Moving

The day came when the big truck my father rented was loaded with all our furniture, clothing and toys.  It was really going to happen.  We were leaving the only place I had ever known as home, the only place I had friends, the only place I ever wanted to be.

As the car and truck were being unloaded at our new home in Kent, NY I pulled out my hoola hoop and did a few tricks with it.  Across the road there was a young girl riding a pony in the orchard.  I imagined that she would think we were circus performers because of all the amazing things I was doing with the hoola hoop.  I don’t think she even noticed us.  Later, I found out she was a neighbor and her name was Cathy.  She was a bit of a tom-boy and a year or two younger than me.  There weren’t very many kids on our road and most of them were girls so we didn’t have too many neighborhood baseball games like we did on Post Avenue.  The houses were so far apart that walking to each one for Halloween was out of the question if a boy wanted to get a lot of candy.  A half mile down the road was a family operated dairy farm.  Just before the dairy farm was the house where Cathy lived with her parents, sister and brother – and the one with the large black snarling dog that would chase you if you were riding a bicycle to the dairy farm.

From an upstairs window we could see a thick deep blue line that was lake Ontario.  Our house was two miles from the shoreline and a drive just past the dairy farm still gives a nice view of the lake.  Once I started attending school, I learned that about a half mile north of us was a boy my age who lived on a small farm.  We became pretty close friends over the years.  He didn’t have anyone else as close as me so I guess it was by default.  His name was Chuck.  His father was a plumber or something and his mother was a teacher.  He had an older brother who was the same age as my oldest brother, Dale.  He also had a younger sister, Connie.  They were a nice hard working family.  All of our new neighbors were hard working it seemed.

The home my parents bought was sitting at an intersection of two country roads.  The road we lived on was two miles long.  The mile we didn’t live on was still a dirt road when we moved in.  To the west of us, and on that dirt road was another house at the intersection.  Mrs. Lee lived there all alone.  She was a nice elderly lady who would invite me into her home, give me milk and cookies and talk with me for a while.  I always liked her.  I liked her even though she once advised me to stop cracking my knuckles.  According to Mrs. Lee, she had done the same thing when she was young and now her knuckles were large, swollen and painful.  I thought how good it would be to have big knuckles.  I didn’t stop cracking my knuckles, but I should have.  Mrs. Lee always had something nice to say.   She smiled a lot and was always friendly.  A good number of years later she was staying in our home as my mother cared for her during her last days on earth.  She was a nice old lady.