An Address with a Story

 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks:
Week 12, Mar 19–25, 2026
#52ancestors
Prompt: An Address with a Story
A story about my grandchildren’s ancestors 

 

2024

A couple of years ago my brother, Bryan, sent our siblings group chat a picture of a house and asked if we recognized it. It had these huge trees covering half of the front and a ramp covered the concrete steps up to the porch.After realizing it was in Norton, Kansas, we knew it was the house we lived in when I was in the 2^nd grade and my younger brother and sister were in the 1^st grade. 

  

2026

 When we zoomed into the picture we could see the railing around the porch.  The railing isn’t what I remember but it kept us from falling off the high porch. I thought the railing was made of decorative concrete blocks that you could see through instead of the wooden slats. It doesn’t look as tall in the picture as I remember. The stairs were wider and had a railing on each side. Of course, I was only 7 years old, so it probably just seemed bigger to me.  There was also a door on the right side of the house with a much smaller porch. When you went through that door, you could go into the kitchen or down to the basement.    

This is the house where we chased fireflies and put them in a jar so we could read after our parents went to bed.  Well, that never really worked and we let them out the next morning.  But we would try again the next night. It was where my brother in the first grade would walk down the alley to an elderly neighbor’s house and talk to him in his garage for hours. We played in the back yard where there was a root cellar with a slanted door that we could slide down.  The side yard was mostly dirt so we could make roads, bridges and cardboard houses for cars and trucks.  When it rained, we played on the huge front porch. Barbara and Kathy played with baby dolls while Bobby and I crouched behind the railing protecting them from the Indians. We walked almost a mile to school every day, in rain, snow, or pretty weather. Daddy was at work before we left for school. Mom didn’t have a car and even if she did, she had Kathy and the twin infants to worry about.  She told me as an adult that she worried every time we left for school and when she knew we were on the way home, especially in bad weather.  For us it was just part of our day and often the most fun. You never knew what interesting rocks or animals you might see. This is where I watched a violent storm break an upstairs window while my mother was trying to put a quilt over it. This was the only time that we lived close to our paternal grandparents and saw them on the weekends. I remember my grandmother teaching me to crochet around wire coat hangers. I still have one of them, but I don’t remember how to crochet. This is the house where we lived when Brent and Bryan were born.

The house was built in 1890 with two stories and a basement. It was a huge house with a huge front porch, although it looks like it shrunk in the last 60 years. We were not allowed to go in the basement because we were renting the house and the owners had stored some of their things in the basement. It was really fascinating to see so much stuff though.  The house had two front doors which I had never seen before. One of the doors opened into a parlor where we were not allowed to play, while the other opened into the living room. There were 3 bedrooms upstairs and our parent’s bedroom downstairs which they shared with babies. All the rooms were small though I didn’t realize how small at the time. The house was only 1,304 square feet which seems small now for a family of eight, but it didn’t seem small then.  I always thought it was a huge house. As a 2^nd grader, I believed it was special, and it probably has more stories than I can tell.