Moving as a Grownup

We've moved a few times in our married life. I can count them on one hand though. We don't like to move and almost everywhere we have lived we would have been perfectly happy staying there forever, but circumstances dictates that sometimes we move when we would rather not.

The first  place we lived was in Bob's Grandma Mollie's house when we were first married. Now we (I) was pretty young and stupid when we got married. I didn't give a thought to where we might live, I just wanted to marry Bob and live happily ever after. Bob's grandma was widowed and afraid to stay alone in her house at night, so she always stayed all night with her daughter, Bob's mom, who lived in shouting distance out the road from her. So, Bob talked her in to staying ALL the time with his mom, and letting us live in her house until we found something different. She agreed, and we moved into her fully furnished house. We lived there for 4 months from December 26 until the end of April, until we decided we had to move out and be on our own.

We moved into a little house/cabin down on Brushy Creek that belonged to Gladys Johnson. It was full of antiques and furniture that her daughter was collecting, and we lived in the front 2 rooms of the 4 room house. We lived there a month, carrying water from Gladys' house, cooking in an electric skillet. We DID have a little fridge. We also had a pet baby white rabbit. It went everywhere in the house, leaving little presents for us. Yeah, we were nasty. I loved that little bunny. It got into something that must have poisoned it and it died. Anyway, it was like camping in a way. Haha.

Then Bob heard that Rolla and Ruth Hodges might rent their little 4 room green house to us. He talked to them and we moved in, paying $20 a month for rent. We had to carry water from Ruth and Rolla's house and still didn't have indoor plumbing, but we were very happy there. We lived there from June 1971 until September 1974. We wanted to buy that house and first Rolla and Ruth considered it, but then Rolla decided he didn't want to sell it. It was when we lived there that I acquired my first puppy. She was part of a litter that got dumped and I brought her home. I named her Amber but that name never rolled off my tongue very well and she ended up plain ole "Puppy Dog".

In the summer of 1974, Bob's mom started talking to us about us buying the house they lived in, the house that Bob grew up in. They wanted to move to their place at Garrison and wanted us to buy the house and live by Bob's grandma and help with her. We did. We moved in September and lived there many years, until the house started falling in. During that time we bought the adjoining farm from Rex and Wanda Maggard, and my mom and dad moved into the house at the top of the road.

My mom, Juanita Sloan died on December 30, 1989 and my dad remarried Donna Stevens on June 4, 1990. He moved into Donna's house, and when Lynn married Eric Guerin on August 11,1990, she and Eric moved into Mom and Dad's house. They divorced a year later and Lynn married Kelly Laughlin on December 25, 1991 and moved to Branson.

Bob and I moved into the house that Lynn moved out of, because our old house was falling in.
We lived there from November, 1991 until July, 1997. I loved that place, and loved being by the road, but also missed the place at the end of the road that we had lived in for so many years.

The house at the top of the road was small. Very small. We were cramped for room and then the house developed dry rot and started getting rotten spots and holes in the floors. The walls were separating from the floor and we worried it might fall down, so we looked into building a house.

I have loved drawing up house plans all my adult life, and had some plans drawn up for a house. We consulted with a builder and went to the bank to borrow the money. On the way home from the bank, we stopped at a place near Forsyth that sold double wide trailers, or as they called them, manufactured homes. The very first one we looked at looked amazingly like the floor plans I had drawn up. Only a few differences. We liked the  house, and it was $20,000 cheaper than the house we had planned to build. Yes, it was a manufactured home which typically isn't built as well as a house, but for $20,000 difference, and considering our ages, 41 and 44 we decided it was good enough. I'm not saying we were old, but that we believed the house would last us the rest of our lives anyway.

We moved the manufactured house into the spot where Bob was raised and where we had lived for 16 years. We have lived here ever since and will probably finish our lives here. It is home.




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