Chapter 8: The Property

Our transition to country life

At the end of kindergarten, my parents announced that we were selling our house on Miller Street and moving to a place called “The Country.” It turned out that even though my dad looked pretty urbanite on the outside, he actually had a deep-rooted need to “live deliberately” in the woods, a la Thoreau. One of his favorite books was called “The Guide to Self-Sufficiency,” and if there weren’t things like a wife and three kids getting in the way I got the feeling that living at his hunting cabin without any running water would have suited him just fine. (Side note: That’s not to say that my dad wanted to be a single man. Nothing could be farther from the truth; if there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that my dad simply cannot live without my mom, and he cherishes all three of his children. So perhaps it would be fairer to say that he wanted us all living together on the hunting land in separate-but-similar hunting shacks, growing our own food, and playing games together and living in harmony. Except that all sounds exactly like a cult. Okay, so maybe all of the above, but absolutely no crazy authoritarian leadership, illegal activity, or brainwashing.)

My mom, on the other hand, was looking at it as a prime opportunity to showcase her decorating skills. Mom had become quite a skilled decorator, and she was completely self-taught. Plus, I want to point out that she always had very good taste. Years before, when my dad was off teaching and coaching, Mom was left at home with two toddlers roughly 15 months apart. (Whatever you do, don’t ask her about the infamous “Winter of Toddler Diarrhea” in Seymour, Wisconsin.) To get through those sometimes very lonely days, she’d spend a lot of time at the local public library, burying herself in home-decorating books. Mom studied everything she could, and to this day everyone asks her for decorating advice, including me. Back in those very early days of the 1980s Mom was poised to splatter country blue and mauve all over the house, along with some of those personalized baked-dough Christmas tree ornaments that everyone was making in 1981.