Chapter 5

I Grew Up Here!

    When I was three, my brother’s dog had given birth to a litter of nine puppies. My mother
had our massive camera with her on my first trip to see the newborn puppies, and she asked on camera to me as we were walking to our barn where the puppies were located: “Where are we going Livy?” I said in excited response: “To see da puh-pees mommy!”
    A month before I was born, my family moved to the farmhouse that I have always lived in. It is remotely located a minutes walk from our barns. The house was pre-ordered out of a catalog, and painted blue. Recently, my mother has told me: “I wish your grandfather would have built us a lovely house when he had a chance instead of this little thing.” She seems to like our home, but my father’s father was a well known carpenter that built several houses in the Canal Winchester and Bloom Carroll areas. He offered to build a house for my parents for several years before they owned the house we live in now, but he passed away six years after this house was raised.
    My mother is a dreamer. She will always have a new project for our living space. When I was about seven, she asked my father to furbish our basement. Before, it had been storage area. Now, our basement serves as an additional family gathering room. At my 12th year, my mother started openly discussing her dreams of a new kitchen. Her dreams came true two years later for my brothers’ high school graduation party. I can recall all the shocked faces that came inside the house to see my father’s hand-made cabinets, granite countertops and family-laid hardwood floors. Don’t worry; I wasn’t the one laying the wood down, I was the one making the hot cocoa for my dad and brother.
   
    My room has had undergone three facelifts since I have inhabited it. For my sixth birthday, my father hired a man to paint my bedroom mauve. Before, my room was a light tan, but by the time I had turned six I was well into my Barbie stage, and I loved anything pink or purple. Why not have a purple room? This color remained on my walls for only nine years. I was fifteen, and I despised pink. My mother agreed to repaint my bedroom a sunny yellow and a very deep sky blue, which are still my favorite colors. I recall the last year my room was that dreadful mauve color. In the winter I started writing and coloring on the walls! It was a good time, plus it persuaded my mother to get cracking on repainting those walls.
    During my childhood, it was hard for me to find a place where I could express my young feminine desires. If my Barbie dolls were left in my bedroom, it was likely I would find them the next day with their heads torn off. Any mother could guess it; this was the doing of my ornery brothers. So, my father built me a playhouse in our backyard. It was blue and about 6x7x9 (lxwxh). This is a little small for a full grown human, but perfect for a five year old girl. I played with my next door neighbor, Kristen there. We played dress up and had make believe tea parties.
Later, the playhouse served as a storage unit and a lamb barn. During the summer when I was fifteen, I would climb up on the roof of the old playhouse and bathe in the sun. My father tore the plywood novelty down when I was sixteen, and for a moment I was a bit melancholy. This destruction was necessary, and now we have more garden space.
    I can’t imagine growing up anywhere else or writing on any other walls. Our home is humble. It welcomes all tired feet and backs from the cornfields, and every snowy hat from the cold winter days. My mother will never rest at bettering this place, and I do not mind that. This is the way it has always been, and I would not trade that for anything different.