My Childhood Home.
This is the house I grew up in. Here you can see the entire front of the house. From left is the kitchen window, the two living room windows with the front door in between, and two of the master bedroom windows. You can’t see it as well in this photograph, but there is a line that runs down the house between the rightmost living room window and the leftmost master bedroom window. That line shows where the original part of the house (the master bedroom) was. The rest of the house was added on later. The original part of the house is well over 100 years old. The house has an attic that runs the length of the house, and for 2/3 the length of the house, it is tall enough for a person to stand up in. The stairs to the attic are at the rear of the kitchen.
When I was growing up, the house was painted light pink and had a barn-red corrugated tin roof. The porch was screened in and there were steps up to the porch, which was as high as the front door is now. You could also see under the house because the house sits up on a pier and beam foundation, and around the edges was stacked up native sandstone rather than skirting. There was also a barbed wire fence that ran around the house, with a gate that led to the pasture out in front. This was necessary because there were horses and cattle on three sides of the house. We had to keep them out of the yard. Our St. Augustine grass would have been quite tasty to them!
You can see a shed to the back right. There is another shed to the immediate right of the house, no more than 20 feet away from the house and another to the left. These sheds always contained farm equipment and vehicles. They were great playgrounds! A gravel drive encircles the shed directly to the right and leads to drive away from the house down to the main gravel road that runs all the way through the ranch and up to the farm-to-market road.
The house sits about a quarter mile off the FM road (aka the Harwood Road) and is situated about seven miles outside of Gonzales, Texas, a town of about 7,000 people. We went into town once a week to do our shopping, and a bus picked me up for school at about 7:15 each morning and dropped me off around 4:30 each evening.
