Tico Tuesday, September 8th

Today's picture is a blast from the past. My brother Zach sent me this picture the other day.

I think the percentage of you who might recognize this house is quite small. It is the house I lived in for 7 years in Auburn, Maine. I never lived anywhere longer than I did in that house. It is the last place that I would consider home. Grove City kind of felt like home, I called it home. But to me, in earthly terms, real homey-home has to have real immediate family there. The house in Auburn was the last place my brothers and I all lived in the same place together with my parents. Now we are all grown up and are in 3 different time zones and 4 different states (and me outside the country). I'd say we're pretty spread out. But, I guess that's life. It makes any time we get together really special!

Head to my blog for some fun memories of the house! Http://smithcj1.blogspot.com/

The house in Auburn was fantastic. Close to all the important places, yet not in the middle of anything too big or special. It had a great yard, out of which I probably dug hundreds of dandelions. We had a pretty perennial garden, raspberries (YUM!!) and plenty of space for catch and whiffle ball. I LOVED my room. It was the master suite!!! It was upstairs, so Mommy and Daddy made their own master bedroom downstairs and I got the original one, walk in closet included (Mommy got half of it though).

Well, really I loved the whole house. Each room and hallway had at least one quilt made by Mommy and nice, big windows. It was all just happy and homey. And clean.

I remember when we put down the new linoleum flooring in the kitchen. I was on my hands and knees with the rolling pin smoothing out all the bubbles. I took a lot of ownership of that floor. I was often on my hands and knees cleaning up anything that made it dirty again. Oh and we had cool stainless steel counters which reads – no need for a cutting board! And they had a great lip on them, so there was never any worry about eggs rolling onto the floor. :-)

I'd say the house was a bit of a fixer upper when we bought it. The first summer we moved there we sided the house and put the pretty black shutters on it and repainted all the doors. I consider myself an expert paint scraper because of this. We also had to do the remodeling downstairs a bit for Mommy & Daddy's room. I remember the family bonding as we all spackled the narrow back hallway together.

Oh, we also had family bonding during the (in)famous “Ice Storm of '98.” Yup, that January was our first winter in Maine and a HUGE, TERRIBLE ice storm swept through almost the whole state. It was traumatic. No power for days -well, luckily we lived near the police station so we got ours back after 3 or 4 days, but some people were without power for 2 weeks!!! We had no working generator and no wood stove. So, we had no heat and only cold water. We all basically moved into my parents room, the warmest room in the house. We wore tons of clothes and were wrapped up in lots of blankets and warm fuzzy bathrobes. And how did we spend our time after it got dark at about 4pm? Snapping white Necco's. It was great! Necco is the New England Candy Company. You might know them as the original makers of SweetHearts (the Valentine's Day candy hearts that say things on them). But they also just make little wafers of the same colors and flavors. The white ones (like Wint-O-Green LifeSavers) spark/glow when you break them in the dark. Daddy was really good at making one white wafer last a long time. And of course we enjoyed eating the little pieces once they couldn't be snapped any smaller. Did we really live 4 days without power? No. The power flashed on once long enough for Mommy to make some soup. But then we went to New Hampshire (which was only a couple hours away) to a hotel for a night or 2. The drive was a bit treacherous since so many trees were down, and of course, the roads were icy too. But we made it, and really enjoyed the hot tub at our hotel!

Well, I guess that's enough reminiscing for now... Stay tuned for more news, thoughts and stories!

Re: my last post.Costa Rica lost the soccer game on Saturday. But, we aren't totally out of the running for the World Cup.