Presence in houses

I have been thinking lately about the many houses I have lived in. I can usually tell the minute I walk into a house how it feels.

The first house I lived in was a little brick house in Plainview, Texas. My father had dug up a small pine tree on Raton Pass. He planted the tree in the front yard of the little brick house. The tree is now so tall you can see it from all over the city. When Tig was going to Wayland Baptist College he was very aware of the family conection to that pine tree. I don't remember that house as we moved to Colorado when I was two. We lived in a rented house in Manitou, Colorado and I don't think I remember that one either. Just what I have been told, you went into the house on the ground floor in the front and out the back door from the basement. The only thing I really remember is that my black baby doll named Pansy disappeared in the move from that house. Yes, I remember the doll and how terrible I felt about loosing it. We moved to Pueblo on the north side of town in a rented house. We lived on the ground floor and the landlady on the second floor. I had a birth day there I don't know if it was the third or the fourth. But my birthday present was a play broom, yes that was what I wanted. I also remember a very large dog, they use to call it a police dog, it must have been a german shepard and at my size it was a very big dog.

We bought a house in Pueblo in what was called the blocks. It had been the elite part of town a long time before. It was a three story sandstone block house. Only the first and second floor was finished. There wasn't a staircase to the third floor and it was unfinished. Down stairs was 3 large rooms, living room, dinning room, kitchen. Second floor had three bedrooms a bath room without a toilet, a little hallway that was left to be used for the stairwell to the third floor.

I experienced my first remembered anxiety attack in the back bedroom of that house. My father and mother were in a little workshop on the alley of that house. Dad was building flower boxes for mother. Dad had his first power saw this must have been about 1937. My Dad sliced into his thumb and I remember my Mom walking into the house holding his hand trying to stop the bleeding. I don't even remember if he went to the doctor or what. But everytime they went out to that workshop and I heard that saw, I experienced an anxiety attack. The presence in
that house was a comforting family presence that was comfortable with the family that lived there.

I'm not talking about ghosts but just the feel inside the house. A house can be warm or cold. Safety, comfort, excitement or unwelcoming and cold. The big rock house was the first one that I was aware of and my feeling was excitement and the rush to have for me to grow up. I felt very sad on leaving. I remember laying on the bed I alway woke up before everyone else. The sun would shine through the leaves on the trees outside the window. I use to love to hear the lions roaring at the zoo. We lived two or three miles from the zoo but you could still hear the lions roaring early in the morning.

More on houses later