The House Where I Grew Up

I wasn’t born in this house
but I got there as fast as I could
arriving when just two months old
it’s the house where I grew up

This nice home in Hampton Park
helped nurture my adolescence days
that upstairs window on the right
is where I slept most every night

Summertime windows always wide open
hoping to catch a cooling breeze
and listening to the cars peel out
from the White Hut a half a mile away

In wintertime it kept us warm
(when we could control the drafts)
springtime made mom’s flowers bloom
and autumn meant back to school

It’s where I learned to crawl and walk
and made numerous childhood friends
we’d play baseball, football, hide & seek
climb trees and jump off of every garage

I walked to school and home for lunch
and rode my bike as far as I could
learned to ride the bus downtown
parents taxied me everywhere else

One day a girl came by this house
and I gave her Led Zeppelin 1
after that I walked her home
45 years later she became my wife

Inside this house was filled with love
although I didn’t recognize it at the time
I wouldn’t trade it for the world
it’s the house where I grew up

——

Image: My Childhood Home, taken late 1955 (probably by Ora S. Rowland), from our family collection. Hampton Park is a small subdivision within the DeVeaux neighborhood of west Toledo, Ohio.

Linked to dVerse Poets Pub — Poetics: Outside Looking In, where Laura Bloomsbury is hosting and asked us to be voyeurs, peeping through windows and doors of a house. One that has no family connections, no memories of our own to call upon. However, I failed, and wrote about a house I know intimately.

18 thoughts on “The House Where I Grew Up”

  1. Beverly Crawford

    What a beautifully sentimental tribute to the house where you grew up — and the icing on the cake is the girl who became your wife 45 years later! BRAVO and standing ovation!

    1. Yes, the lesson here is to be nice to the people you meet in elementary school, because you never know…

  2. I totally understand. The want to write about a house I knew and loved was strong in me too. I”m so glad you did. Write what’s in your heart and it comes out strong and intact and reverberating. This is a lovely piece of memoir.

  3. I’m awestruck you ended up marrying your childhood sweetheart 45 years later. Some things ARE meant to be. I’m so happy you found each other again. Looks like a nice house to grow up in. Is that a burb of Chicago?

    1. I like to say she chased me off in grade school, and told me to come back when I grew up. So, 45 years later, I tried again.

      Not Chicago, but on the same parallel. Hampton Park is a small subdivision within the neighborhood known as DeVeaux in west Toledo, Ohio, just a mile or two south of the Michigan border.

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