The Duplex

From about ages 7 to 12 my family lived in a small duplex at the foot of Grandview Hill in Provo. There were only 2 bedrooms so my sister and I had to share one of the rooms, which prompted a lot of arguments about nightlights (I preferred to sleep without a nightlight but my sister insisted on it). The carpet was green shag and the appliances were avocado and mustard-colored. The cupboards were very dark and it was a 70's house through and through.

I have a lot of memories of living in that house, but a few in particular stand out such as the time my dad broke his thumb. He was exercising with weights (dumbbells) and somehow slammed his thumb in between two of them at high velocity. He immediately said to me, "get a bowl of water!" I thought it was strange at the time and I still think is strange. I really should ask him about that sometime :) I remember him putting his broken thumb in the water, and it turned red from his blood.

One time we built a snow cave in the back yard. It's hard to imagine Provo even getting enough snow to build a snow cave now, but I guess it happened back then. We also had a raft and would occasionally go boating on Utah Lake, which was much deeper and maybe a little cleaner than it is now. I used to love getting sick, which sounds a little weird but it was kind of fun to stay home and watch game shows on TV instead of going to school.

We had some outdoor cats that we occasionally fed while we lived there. We named one of them Calico and the other one Suzy Q. Suzy Q had babies and I remember playing with the kittens, but one day we found one dead and soon afterwards the rest of them died. I was told they had contracted distemper.

One time we were driving in our neighborhood and my dad pointed out a barley plant. I got the idea from what he said that barley could be eaten, just like walnuts or fruit from a tree. So I went back later by myself and tried to munch on it. Needless to say, it didn't go very well. I think something got a little bit stuck in my esophagus and I had a hard time swallowing for like a year, but I was too embarrassed to say anything to anyone. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way :)

There was another time when I went to a cub scout meeting and one of the boys had worked with his dad to disassemble a battery and make a little display of how they worked. I wanted to do the same thing, so I went outside with a hammer and some batteries and started whacking them. I ended up getting battery acid in my eye, but fortunately my mom was home and immediately put me under the sink for like 15 minutes to flush it out.

When I was 12 years old (specifically on October 28th) we moved across town to a new house where my sister and I could have our own rooms AND since we owned a house for the first time my parents bought me a dog (a terrier I named Sammy). The day we moved I was standing on the tailgate of our banana yellow pickup truck and slipped. My elbow landed between the tailgate and the truck and it hurt so badly I thought I might have broken it, so my mom took me to the emergency room. It turned out it wasn't broken, but I did need three stitches. The doctor told me I might feel some pushing and pulling, but it was one of the most painful experiences of my life. Either "pushing and pulling" was code for "pain that would make a grown main faint" or the local anesthetic wasn't working at all, because I swear I felt everything. The elbow may not seem like a very sensitive part of the body, but when someone starts pushing a needle and thread through it without anesthesia it definitely gets noticed.

I learned to cross-country ski while I was living in that duplex, went through about 12 skateboards (I kept leaving them in places where they got run over by cars), made new friends, graduated from primary, got hit by a car while riding my bike, caught snakes, built clubhouses, played at the GRA park, went sledding and explored and played and went on the rope swing on Grandview hill, and did a million other things while living in that house that I look back on with fondness. Mine was truly a blessed childhood, and I can honestly say that the Grandview area is still one of my favorite places in the world.