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The point of this blog is mostly to post the pictures I didn’t have when I initially blogged about my childhood home.

When my parents bought our house it was the mustard color you can see in the picture below:

My parents painted the house “Shadow Grey” and added black shutters which I always thought improved the look significantly.  The also built a porch on the North side of the house.  Prior to the porch we had a door to nowhere.  The door was on the second story and opened up to a two story drop straight down.

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Our yard flooded regularly. Whenever there was a particularly big rain storm, all the water from the fields that surrounded our house would drain through our yard to the little brook just past the weeping willow on the Drolls’ side of the fence. Our house, garage, and barn were all on hills with a valley between the house and the barn. It was this valley where the water flowed. If it rained enough we’d get a fast flowing stream with water as high as our waist in some places. It was always exciting to see how high or fast the water was flowing. I’m sure my mom was much less excited because when the river stopped and the water dried up, we’d find a path of gravel and debris in the yard. My parents tried to build a small wall to stop some of the debris from crossing the gravel driveway into the yard, but I think they were disappointed by the results.

The day I held my high school graduation party, it was raining and the yard was starting to flood. The party was held in a room in my dad’s warehouse (in the former barn). We had to build a bridge for my friends to cross out of pallets and scraps of wood. I know my family has pictures somewhere of some of the deeper and more severe floods, but all I have is a few of the flood from my graduation party (an example of one of our milder and smaller floods).

I should apologize in advance for the woeful supply of pictures I have of my old home. I was able to get some images from Google, but they’re from very far away and show several things not present in my childhood.

Sometime after my brother Lee was born, but while I was still 2 we moved from Marion to Tiffin. Tiffin is located about 40 minutes North of Marion. We moved into a two story house with a flat roof. We used to say it looked like a lunchbox without a handle. It was about three miles to the edge of town, technically located in Clinton Township.

We were mostly isolated from neighbors with cornfields partially surrounding our house  and a small forest and a farm across the street.
We had one neighbor, the Drolls, who lived next door to our property. Our houses were separated by a worn out old wire fence and a line of trees. It was roughly about 100 yards from our front door to the fence and then maybe the same distance from the fence to the Droll’s house. The Fence ran almost the entire length of the yard.  It ended just a few yards before the street.  Where it ended, there was a small patch of trees with a little brook. The brook had a small bridge over it on the Drolls’ side of the fence. Considering the fact that we lived next to the Drolls for most of my life, I hardly knew them. They were elderly with no children living at home. They had a dog that used to come into our yard and take our toys. We would get in trouble for leaving toys out where the dog could get them and every so often we would go to the Drolls house to see if any of our toys had been dragged over. I think I was inside their house one or two times, but I can’t say that I remember anything about it. I picture him wearing dirty old jeans and her with dark hair done up “old lady style.” I’m not sure I’d recognize them if I ran into them on the street—that’s how little we saw of them. I can remember him bringing over things from their garden a few times. The only other thing I can say about the Drolls is that in later years they put a sign out that said “Droll’s Hair Fashion” and they outlined the sign in reflectors so that you could see it from a distance. The sign eventually became my landmark to slow down so I could turn into our driveway.

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