I came home and listed all the houses where I had ever
lived. There were 18 of them ranging from Essex County in the UK to Washington
DC, New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Boulder, Greeley and Fort Collins in
Colorado.
The runaway winner for the most melodic address goes to 8605
Sundale Drive, Rosemary Hills, Silver Spring, Maryland. Ironic because the
house was a sad little structure hastily built to accommodate the flood of
workers coming to Washington DC during World War II.
Situated at the bottom of a hill, our basement quite
regularly became the depository for a surge of muddy water. Remnants of those
floods clung to our Christmas ornaments forever after. It was the house where I
had regular panic attacks most every day, alone in the darkened living room
before leaving for the first grade. It was also where my dad taught me to run
cold water over my wrists in the hot humid months, to help me sleep at night.
“Helmsley,” in Brentwood, Essex, gets the prize for the most
elegant house I ever lived in. The Brits like to name their houses. I was born
in “Rye Cottage,” and soon moved to Helmsley before war-related forced
evacuation from the UK took us to the U.S. We spent a summer in Groton.
Connecticut before my dad took up his wartime job in DC and we settled in to
Sundale Drive.
Near war’s end my mother, brother David and I moved to
Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York. My dad
returned to London to resume his job. We joined him when the war was officially
over, and in time to get a glimpse of princess Elizabeth and Margaret in the
victory parade in London.
We took up residence in a charming little cottage in Coxty
Green in the British countryside. My most vivid memory from there is of a herd
of cows passing by each evening on their way to their home pasture. I can still
hear my brother calling out, “The cows are marching.” Isn’t it weird, the
things you remember from childhood?
From Coxty Green we moved into “The Chantry” on Priests
Lane, which seemed it might be a permanent home. By this time I had been in
school for a while and had mostly gotten over being the kid with the weird
accent (American). But no. We were not to stay. My dad had itchy feet.
In late 1946 my little brother John arrived, welcomed even
though unexpected, and more than 10 years my junior. When he was three months
old, we shipped off to the US again, this time so that my dad could take up a
position in the Foreign Department of the Seattle First National Bank. But he’d
never been a banker. We paused in New York for four months where he learned
about banking and where once again I became the kid with the weird accent (British)
in Scarsdale, New York.
In their wisdom, because I was deficient in American
history, they said, the school enrolled me in fourth grade. After a few weeks,
they decided that maybe I really belonged in the fifth grade. Fourth graders
were Brownies. Fifth graders were Girl Scouts. I was the only member of the
Girl Scout troop with a Brownie uniform which made me an awkward standout.. I
weathered that one without much angst. In the Scarsdale house I was lucky
enough to have a four-poster bed. Bubble
gum was a new thing and not easy to come by. I saved mine every night—sometimes
for as long as a month— a huge lump stuck onto one of those graceful posters.
Then on to Seattle, reached by a three-day trip on the
Empire Builder, a train we came to love. My dad would sometimes take us down to
the train yard in Seattle on a Sunday morning to see the Empire Builder get
washed. Such simple pleasures!
In Seattle we took up residence at 1900 Taylor Avenue on
Queen Anne Hill with an expansive view of Lake Union. I finished my elementary
education at John Hay School and by the time I entered Queen Anne High School I
felt totally at home. I loved everything about Seattle—the salt water—the fresh
water—the mountains—even the liquid sunshine.
We bought a little cabin on Liberty Bay for $6,000 and it
was on the rural roads surrounding the place that my dad taught me to drive.
During the process, I drove us into a significant ditch where we were firmly
stuck. Chunky, barely 16 and wearing a
two-piece swim suit that did my shape no favors, my dad ordered me out of the
car to knock on a stranger’s door and ask to borrow a shovel. Mortified, I did it anyway.
At Queen Anne High School I was elected to a student council
office. My braces were gone and Conrad Jacobsen had taken it upon himself to
kiss me. Life was good. Too good to last. My dad’s itchy feet intruded again.
In November 1952 I flew with my family, kicking and screaming, to Philadelphia
where my dad took up a job at Philadelphia National Bank. I entered Lower
Merion High School, one unhappy camper who had never seen a pair of Bermuda
shorts and thought everyone spoke with a very strange accent. I spent my free
time that year writing letters to friends back home in Seattle. After all these
years, I still keep up with some of them.
We rented a house at 1515 Surrey Lane in Ardmore, PA and
within a year had bought 1424 Westwood Drive in the same neighborhood, the
first house we had ever owned. It was from that house that I headed off to
college in Ohio. “Not one dime will I give you to go west of the Mississippi River,” my dad told me when I wanted to apply to the University of Washington
in Seattle. So, spurning his suggestion that I go the Bryn Mawr, an all-girls
school close by, I chose to go west to Ohio Wesleyan. It was a choice I never
regretted. That was my first step toward moving west that in some ways I have
been pursuing ever since.
In the summer of 1958, with a degree in English in hand, I
married an Ohio Wesleyan boy who I had convinced to go west—well—not as far as
I wanted to go, but to Colorado. At least I was headed in the right direction.
(For those of you who have waded through all this--bad news--there's more to come!)
Good news this week is that I'm sold out of my book, Still Running. It is available on Amazon and I'll have more in a few days.
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