Move The House? Are you CRAZY?
What do you mean, we have to move the house?!
This story was part of a daily writing exercise I (ok, foolishly) gave myself in April 2021. Because I (yes, foolishly) titled most of the pieces with the date it was written, there are about twenty-five not-bad stories hidden in plain sight. Here’s one with its new title. Updated 11/20/21
Maybe it’s different now but just past the middle bit of the last century, it was standard operating procedure to not tell the kids what was going on. I recall overhearing something about Mom having cancer once. She went away for a couple of days but no one said why. We didn’t ask because we knew no one would give us an honest answer. Also SOP. It does make things a little complicated when doctors want to know the family medical history, however.
Once in a while, something came along that required the kids had to be told something even if it was not really the whole story.
When I was eight we lived on Weeden Road in Randolph, a very small town in western New York state. Our house, the one with the walls that were “goose-ass green”, was a big old heap of a thing just up the hill from a pond where my Mom taught me how to catch garter snakes so they wouldn’t bite me.
