(image from Google Maps)
We've come to the end of this series. Not counting the places the family lived before my mother left my father in 1972 - which may have been as many as three different homes, but no one in the family can tell me addresses for sure - I have lived in twenty-three different places. As I am now 53, that averages out to about two years & four months per home. I'm not sure how that compares to most people - or even to the rest of my family! From around 1989 until 2017, for example, my mother lived in the same place. During that time, I have lived in about fifteen or sixteen different places - & before that, she & I lived in the same place from the time I was born until 1986.
This is the rental we lived when we first moved to Portland. That picture is from August 2019, so we were living in this house when it was taken. I used to sit on that chair to change shoes when we went for walks in the rain. The little room to the right of the front door was where my computer & music collection was, so I would've been in there most of the time (unless you count sleeping) (& since the car is not in the driveway, we were probably not home when the Google car drove by).
The place was too big - three or four bedrooms (if you count the little room in the front, it was four), three bathrooms, two floors. Two of the rooms we basically used for storage. One of our dogs is geriatric, so the stairs were a problem. Oh, & we paid way too much for rent - because we had three dogs. We never told the landlord about the cats. We learned that trick back in Kentucky. We rented the house two months before we moved - we visited in March, & didn't want to repeat the Fort Worth experience where we came to a place sight unseen.
Still, we loved the neighborhood & we had excellent neighbors, whom we met the day we drove in. The wife began looking for a place to buy almost immediately - & in fact the place we did buy is about a third of a mile away, although we did look elsewhere. On the whole, we were happy here - by the time we left, I was doing two shows on the Portland airwaves & volunteering at three excellent stations.
This series ends because the 23rd place I used to live is currently the place I live. Like a paraphrase of the Mitch Hedberg joke, "I used to live on Insley Street. I still do, but I used to, too." Maybe I'll talk about it next week. But if you've been paying attention, last week I said that the house is Fort Worth was my favorite place to live, & I think I said that the house in Lexington (the one we owned) was my third. The place I currently live is my second favorite place to live.
The one up there? It was okay I suppose for a stopover. I felt bad because it didn't have much of a yard, so I felt my sweet pup Pauline was missing her excellent Fort Worth backyard, & we started walking them twice a day to make up for it. We continue to do that even though she has a much better yard now. Maybe it turned out we needed those walks, too.
