All the places I've lived

"Where have you lived and how has it shaped you?"

Recently I was talking with a Real Estate client about places we've lived and how the different locations reflect the time in life, "where" we were financially, socially, and in other ways.  

I remembered the nice tool we have available in Google Earth and scrounged together some old pics to fill in gaps to look back over my history with houses.

First stop, after being born in Gainesville, Missouri (1967), I lived the first five years at Howard's Ridge, Missouri.  At first, we had a house on some pasture where my grandpa kept cattle, hogs, etc. The first house burned down after catching fire from some embers from the fire place.  

We had a well out front with a pump handle and an active outhouse behind the house that looked older than our house.

While the house was being rebuilt on the same spot, we lived in a cabin, not far from Liner Creek, on Lake Norfork, just a few miles down the road.  There's not a good picture of the whole cabin, but I found one with my dad out front, playing guitar.

After the rebuild, we moved back in and stayed there till I finished Kindergarten in Gainesville, MO.  We lived just a quarter mile down the road from my dad's folks and just a few more miles in the other direction were mom's folks.

Life was all about hanging out with family, feeding hogs, working the garden, looking after the cattle, feeding chickens, going fishing, eating grandma's delicious foods, climbing a Mimosa Tree, and a host of outdoor things.

We had family over occasionally to have food, play music, and just hang out.  I remember the living room being filled with cigarette smoke from my uncles and cousins when they'd come over to play guitar and tell stories about truck driving and construction.

I think it was this house where, during a holiday gathering, both grandpas got into it over how to do some kind of bathroom repair and we never got the whole family with both sides together again.

 

While living in Missouri, my parents both worked over the state line in Mountain Home, Arkansas.  Mom worked at Baxter Labs in chemical/filling on third shift.  Dad worked on and off at different places, mainly at the Corps of Engineers, while we lived in Missouri.

For a year or more, we had a string of strong weather with rain and thunderstorms, eventually and repeatedly flooding an important bridge on the road to Mountain Home, forcing my folks to have to drive a much longer route to the West to get to work.

Eventually, the decision was made to sell our house in Missouri and move to a rental in Mountain Home (@ '72).  Looking back, I don't know or remember how that impacted my grandparents, since our house was in the middle of their pasture land - but I'm guessing it all worked out with the new owners and a fence.

We made the move to the big city of Mountain Home and into a little rental house on McClure Lane.  Being five, I had zero clue of what was going on or that we were taking a big step down in housing.  It was what my folks could find on short notice and what they could afford.  

 

My older siblings and I shared a bedroom in this little house.  Three of us in a bedroom - or at least to my memory!  And then a surprise came along a little over a year later with my little sister being born.  I was seven by this time, my brother fourteen, and my older sister eleven.  After she was born, my dad built an extra/new bedroom on the back of the house by dividing the larger dining room in half.  Cozy but effective and my sisters had their own room!

Lots of early childhood development happened there.  I learned to ride a bike, made friends with all the neighborhood kids, took long rides/trips with friends around the town on our bikes, walked to the local convenience store for ice cream, and lived a comfortable oblivious life - enjoying the best of the early 70's culture that came through TV.

After second grade (@'74), or thereabouts, our family moved about a mile or two to the West of our first house in Mountain Home.  We lived there for three years or so, if memory serves me.  It was another rental.

Dad worked at different jobs, mom still worked here third shift job at Baxter Lab.  We all went to school, church activities, and traveled on the weekends to see the grandparents or they'd come see us.

I remember the sewer system having big problems with drainage and my dad rigging up the pipe WAY out from the house where, if it backed up, it would overflow into the field near our garden.  Such a weird memory.

My brother turned sixteen here and began driving a car my grandpa "gave him" in exchange for cutting wood all summer.  My folks began to have some powerful relationship issues with my dad leaving occasionally, returning again after days or weeks.

The picture below is that house today - not long after we had moved out of it, a local church bought the property and physically moved the house to the other side of town where it still sits with a few upgrades and in a slightly nicer neighborhood, across from the elementary school.

 

At some point around the fourth or fifth grade, my folks decided it was time to buy another house and quit renting.  This is back when houses cost a nickel and interest rates were handled differently.  Being a child, I had no clue of what was going on, just that we were getting a new house!  ('77ish)

This is where we did most of our growing up years.  Just down the street from the church building where we "went to church" and from the elementary school I attended through the fifth grade.  

Lots of memories here - good and bad.  Dad came and went a lot.  My brother finished school and moved out.  At some point my sister finished school and went to college for a bit and eventually met my brother-in-law.  (And I'm 100% open to my timeline and details to be corrected by siblings, this is just what I vaguely remember.)

At some point, with my folks splitting up over their issues, my mom, younger sister and I moved to a duplex on Coley Drive, just down the road a bit.  

We stayed there for a couple of years it seemed before my dad decided he was going to let the house note go back to the bank and be foreclosed on - at which point my mom stepped in and figured out a way to get his name off the loan and take the payment over herself and we moved back in and he moved out.

 

I'd stay there till I graduated high school in '85 and came back for summers through '88.  So much history there - school, church memories/youth group, working different jobs, especially at the local Wendy's during the last couple of years before finishing high school.  Very much at the lower end of the middle class slice of life, but doing okay.

The house was in good shape all the way until mom passed away a couple years ago.  She and her husband Jack did a great job of updating it a good bit.  After she passed, it was sold to my cousin who has a Real Estate company in area and he manages a lot of rentals, etc.

During college, I lived in a couple of decent dormitories. One was kind of an armpit in its condition, but it was all we knew back then.  The next dorm, right next door, was okay.  Colleges and their amenities were MUCH less the comfortable (and ridiculously expensive) places they've become, but they were just fine for the mid to late 80's.

 

After graduating in May of '89, we married in June and moved into married student apartments.  They were fine for the six months we were there.  I think this is an old aerial view and they were mowed down to make new, much more expensive housing.

 

After graduation and marriage, it was "find a job or join the Army" and a job opened up in Little Rock and we moved there in December of '89.  We moved into a little apartment off of Kanis Road, right behind the big Baptist Hospital in what was then West Little Rock.  

There's not a good picture of what was "The Out In The Woods Apartments" (the actual name!) but they were kind of in the woods.  They've changed hands and names since then.  It was a nice, if small, landing place to start life in Central Arkansas.

We stayed there and enjoyed the apartment complex laundry and pool for a couple of years or so.  The only strange things there was occasionally getting your laundry stolen and the lady across the breezeway from us having 12+ cats and the terrible odor from her place.  Eventually the authorities came and took her cats and she moved out.  Took them a LONG time to get that smell out.

 

Ranell finished up her college degree and began teaching and life was moving along.  The church we worked for helped us find an old HUD home (Housing and Urban Development) that was repossessed and in need of work.  Several volunteers helped get it up to snuff and we moved in!

After being there a bit, we lost a baby and then our oldest came along - a daughter!  And then several life experiences later, so did our second born - a son!

After living in that house for several years, we began looking for something to spread out in a little more.  I think we looked for a year or so, back when the Realtor would load you in their car and drive you around to look at houses.

I used to run a lot all the time and the house we finally moved into was one I ran by almost every day and imagined how cool it would have been to live there - but thought, "We'll never be able to afford that!"  And then one day our Realtor said it had come open for sale!

We were pretty excited about it!  Our kids were still fairly young and we knew our family would likely grow.  It's changed a LOT since then.  There were more trees in the front and a lot more green touches.  After years of kids in the front yard, it's just now starting to return to a lawn and less of a ball field.  Our youngest was born while we lived here.

So many years and so many memories in this house.  Such good people in that neighborhood (still!) and lots of good times.  Our oldest two finished high school while we're there.  We went through two BIG, sweet dogs and a very strong-willed cat who ruled over the dogs.  So much history there.  When I think about our family's history, most of it is in that house - in that part of Little Rock.  

 

And then COVID came along.  Ranell and I had been looking at getting more into investments for our future so we'd have something to retire on, so we began to look for a house to buy so we could rent our other house out - and eventually rent the new house out and...rinse and repeat.

When COVID was going, we began looking and our excellent agent helped us comb through a LOT of options.  We finally found on just across the river for a good price from some highly motivated sellers who wanted to get out of town.

So, just a little over four years ago, we moved to our current spot in Maumelle, just across the river from Little Rock.

 

It's interesting to walk through your history and think about the places you've lived, the people you've known, what caused you to live there and then move again - so many economic, social, and even spiritual shifts that occur in all of that.

Listening to my wife's house history was enlightening as well - how her family moved around in the KC, MO area in her growing up years.

And I know that my kids will all have their own stories and memories from our past that are more or differently detailed than mine AND that they'll have their own in the future as well.

Lots to reflect on.

I know I am blessed.