We move to a swamp, and my brother begins collecting critters.

 

In February of 1957 my father moved his drawing surface from the dinette table to the maple dining table and started a big project.  He began to design us a new house.  My mother was pregnant, my brother Ken was was finding his tiny bedroom too small to hold all of his dinosaurs, and there was no room for another child.  Dad had bought a lot, and was planning a house with four bedrooms and a mother-in-law suite across the car port from the main house.

Then came a massive snow storm.  We lost power and heat, and my mother was not going to let her kids get cold.  So, she looked in the newspaper and found a house with heat, and told my father to buy it.  By that night--things happened more quickly in those simpler times--he had bought it.  My mother no longer had a Jeep to use, but she had an red and white 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 with a moving-van sized trunk, and we were sleeping in warm beds if not that very night then certainly by the next one.

The new house was amazing to me.  It was very mid-century modern, with no porch or outbuildings, with a carport rather than a garage.  (My father wasted no time in building a shop at the back of the lot.) There were pocket doors and casement windows and central heat and air conditioning, artificial cork floors and bullet lamps.   And very little drainage.  I liked that the water often reached to within a few feet of the front door.  There were not many people in the neighborhood then, and we could mess around in boats right on Wilmar Circle.  When the water receded, there were hundreds of crawdads holes to invite crawdad catching.  My room was now slightly bigger, and a square, since the closet had been built with the rest of the house instead of added later.  It would be the last time my parents moved.

I think the move says a lot about both my parents.  My mother, as I suggested before, saw a house as a sort of tool for mothering, and my father saw it as something he needed to provide, but he had too many other projects to dwell too much on dwelling.  I think he was very disappointed that he didn't get to build a house of his own design, but the new shop had room for bigger boats and even airplanes, with their wings removed.  

The house on the left of the photo was not there when we moved in.  The house on the right was, but it was occupied by people who never seemed to approve of us.   We went fishing and hunting. They played golf.  Their front yard was a putting green; ours was crab grass.  (I did, however, get called upon to back the woman of that house's Volkswagen out of the driveway many days, because she kept forgetting how to put it in reverse.)  Across the street, however, was a house filled with a catholic family:  many children.  I think the first critter my brother Ken brought home was one of those children, a kid his age physically but a little slow mentally.  He brought him proudly to the back door and told mother,  'Look.  I found me a boy.' That boy was the first of a whole series of critters he brought home.  There were snakes and a 'possum and assorted lizards and frogs and of course crawdads, a bulldog that mother managed to disappear one day,  and a very memorable chipmunk that, after it had eaten the glue on the spines of a beautiful leather-bound set of histories that was my pride and joy, met its demise in the v-belt of the washing machine.  My brother would continue over the years to bring all sorts and conditions of animals and people to mother's house, long after he was grown, but that's a rather complex story.  

Soon the flooding was solved by a new storm sewer, and more folks with kids near my age moved in, with whom I explored the storm sewers and tried to dig to China and wrestled and hunted black panthers in Christian Creek, into which the storm sewer drained. 

One of my first hobbies there, before I took up astronomy--the shop was a great place to build telescopes--was weather forecasting, and my instruments lived on the wall of dad's shop.  It's fascinating how even a temporary climate change can make big differences in a family's life.