Grandpa and Grandma McConaughy Farmhouse

    When I was young I dearly loved this house.  I can remember so much about it.  I remember the memories attached to each room and every smell.  In my mind, It was the perfect home.  When I was really young my grandparents lived upstairs and Florence (the owner) lived downstairs.  I loved Florence like she was another grandmother.  It was her, I think, that first nourished my love of reading.  The upstairs had a living room, 2 bedrooms, a pass through bedroom (hall with a bed), a closed in porch that doubled for a bedroom for a time, a bathroom and a HUGE kitchen with a large walk in pantry.  My brother and I loved to play in the pantry on an old metal cash register.  Every Saturday night the family tradition was to get together in that kitchen and make and eat pizza.  What great memories I have of those times.  We usually got to sleep in the hall bed (a bunk built into the wall over the stairs) whenever we visited; which meant that we could hear everything going on around us.  Years later, after Florence died, the family inherited the farmhouse and moved downstairs.  My favorite room downstairs was the round sunroom.  It was, of course, sunny, and the games and puzzles were out there. 

     There were two sets of stairs.  One from the front door that was always kind of scary for me when I was young as it was open on one side.  The other stairs were off the living room and came up under the hall bed.  We loved to play on these stairs.  My brother came flying down the stairs once and missed some steps and landed flat on his back.  He knocked the air out of his lungs and didn’t take a breath for so long my dad was about to panic and was ready to head to the hospital.  Outside the house there was a play house that we turned into a drive thru restaurant, a grocery store, a house, a school, etc...  There was also a treehouse overlooking the pigpen.  The best thing about playing outside was when grandpa let us drive the lawnmower and we drove all over the farm.  We also liked to play in the barn -  we were city kids for the most part and the barn fascinated us.

    There was one year when I was in the third grade that we actually lived within a mile of my grandparents.  We got to spend a lot of time at the farm.  And to this day I tell people that was my favorite childhood year and my favorite place to live.