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i used to live here
July 10, 2011
These photos of every house I’ve lived in have been sitting on my hard drive for a couple of years now, waiting to be made into a page on this site called “every house I’ve lived in”. Which page is clearly never going to get itself made. So, here begins a new level of navel gazing at jodi’s weblog. Enjoy!
166 Columbia Drive, Huron Park, Ontario: December 1971 to spring (or early summer) 1975. I was an only child in this two bedroom 1.5 storey house, from which we moved for more spacious digs when my mom was pregnant with my little brother. Above is how the house looked in 2006 with an ugly new wood porch and beige vinyl siding. When I was a baby the house had light blue slate siding and the wartime housing standard issue concrete block porch with fat iron railings, painted black, as seen in this photo from 1973:
scanned from negatives, Kodak Safety Film
Fun fact about this house: maybe four or five years after we had moved to a larger house up the street, when I was about six or seven, there was a late night fire in the upstairs bedroom where I had slept as a toddler. I’m going to guess it happened around Easter because my memory of the fire is all tangled up with that of some chocolate bunnies that were so tall my parents had to move a shelf up in the fridge just to get them in. Anyway. My mom woke me in the night and said she had something to show me, and she took me down to the back porch and pointed across the back field where we could see the sloped roof of my former bedroom engulfed in flames. Then she told me that the fire might have started because of all the socks I used to shove down the heating registers when I was little, and “so you shouldn’t do that here, because we want to live in this house for a long time”.
I didn’t find out until I was around twelve that the fire was actually started by grow lights in a weed closet.
In my mom’s defense, she was very, very young, probably about 24, and she has no memory of saying anything like that to me, and I have a vivid imagination and also some other memories from around the same time of walking up a tree-lined lane on what looks like an old-timey Southern plantation, hand in hand with two women in long dresses and big floppy hats, sweating through my pyjamas from the heat. And I’m fairly certain that never happened.
Here’s what we drove when we lived at 166 Columbia. This was after the white VW bus had bitten the dust, and before the green Austin Mini. My parents always had the cool tastes in imported motorcars.
scanned from negatives, Kodacolor X
Posted by jodi on July 10, 2011 at 9.22am
Categories: i used to live here, makes you think all the world's a sunny day (oh yeah), navel gazing
Comments on "i used to live here"
[...] socks got shoved down the heat registers in this house, and no fires started. There was, however, a 15cm diameter hole in my bedroom wall, [...]
Posted by jodi’s weblog :: i used to live here* on July 29, 2011 at 12.42pm :: link