One of the Many Places That We Lived.

Talking to my Mom today we some how got on the subject of an old house we once leased in the small town of Wilmore, Kentucky. What crazy times we had in that place. It had two bedrooms on the first floor, a bedroom upstairs and a basement mother-in-law apartment.

Such fond memories we had of the nine months we spent in that place right across the street from our church. Well at least we can laugh about those times now anyway.

My Mom was in seminary and chose to rent out the basement apartment to two other seminarian guys she knew. She had given my sister Margo one of the downstairs bedrooms, while Mom and I shared the other.

And lucky Joe, my brother, got the upstairs bedroom. That upstairs room was cool. Joe was in heaven. There were odd furnishings left here and there in the house by the owners. One such furnishing was a lion skin on the wall of Joe’s room. Now in the stipulation of the lease, a two-page single-spaced front and back typed affair, it asked that none of these items be removed or touched.

Well one of the first things to happen in that place was the tail falling off the lion skin. A sad omen of things to come I’m afraid. As luck would have it, soon after, the basement flooded out the seminarians and they were moved upstairs with Joe. They endured their close living arrangements with our family as best as they could, witnessing the goings on of a house full of teenagers.

Everything from my Mother discovering I’d conned the neighbors across from the house we planned to buy into taking care of a puppy a whole month for me, telling them, “Of course my Mother knows I have this puppy”, to my Mom charging Margo money for driving her to school every time she missed the bus.

During this time my sister and I fought horribly over everything from the use of the bathroom mirror to TV channels. On one such occasion we must have been incredibly loud waking up the sleeping men upstairs on a Saturday morning with one of our fights over socks. That afternoon we found a laundry basket full of them with a note “Please help yourselves so that next weekend we can all sleep in peace!”

Yes, for sure those were fun times. Of course I’m not sure how the seminarians remember it.