I’m way overdue for posting and I know I missed last week’s memory challenge. I’m still in adjustment mode. But there’s still a bit of Tuesday left so let’s see what we can come up with for stepping inside the way back machine of our childhoods. I’m still working on the yard and I’m still dealing with one person in the neighborhood who is less than thrilled with what we are doing in the yard. So that makes me think about people in my neighborhoods growing up.

For the first ten years or so I lived in my grandmother’s house. Ginny was an old lady, older than my grandmother, who lived next door. She made these amazing rot-your-teeth Congo bar cookies that were sort of like a chocolate chip cookie bar. I wore out a hole in the privet hedge between our houses running over to see her after school. After she died or moved the Tuey family moved in. They owned the local Chinese restaurant. Mr. and Mrs Tuey were busy all the time. Grandma took care of baby Timmy. Linda was a few year younger than I was but we played together a lot.The grandmother used to wash vegetables for the restaurant and hang them on the clothesline, sheets of cabbage and kale and who knows what else right in-between baby Timmy’s diapers.

On the other side, I only remember the Truitt family. The house had a mother-in-law house behind it but we were never supposed to go into the backyard and bother the person living there. The Truitt’s had a lot of kids. Two older boys who were crazy about baseball. Jan, my age, and at least one little brother. Jan and I were sorta best friends for a while until she punched me in the face for no reason I ever understood and then lied about it. Mrs. Truitt used to make American Beauty Cake for our birthdays. She used to put a penny, a nickle, a dime, and a quarter into the batter. I suppose we should have worried about breaking a tooth but we were always just anxious to see who got what money.

Across the street was Grandma Stotts and Gilbert and Hazel Hills. Hazel had some disability and used crutches all the time. She gave piano lessons. Next to them was the deBenedetti family. Lisa deBenedetti was one of my grandmother’s best friends. They had a hedge of olives around their front yard and the steepest stairs ever to get up to the front door.

There was a house directly across the street from my grandmother. A duplex with close to the front and another one at the end of the long driveway. The house was white. There wasn’t much lawn but there was tree in center of the dirt. I remember Elvira Dorris living there about the time I was in Junior High and we had crushes on Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy.

But that’s not what I remember most about that house.

I remember my mother telling me that  for a few months my birth father lived in that house. That house across the street from my grandmother.

Every time I went into Elvira’s bedroom to play dress-up and let’s get married I would wonder, was this my dad’s old room?

Your turn. Who were the people in your neighborhood?