925 Gardenia

In a small town, in an average neighborhood, on 925 Gardenia Circle was my mostly average house. There were a few cool things about my house- my exceptionally green lawn (due to my dad's great desire to have the nicest lawn in the neighborhood) and the laundry shoot. I don't know what the laundry shoot was really called, but that's what I called it. It looked like a cabinet in my upstairs in between my parents, Twinkies (my sister 2 years older than me), and my own room. When you opened the cabinet, there was a drop to the main floor into the laundry room. All you had to do to get your dirty clothes to the laundry room was open the door and drop them and gravity did the rest. The even better reason I loved the laundry shoot was because it was a great place to hide during hide and seek. When Twinkie or I was it, the other one would never hide there because it would be too obvious of a hiding spot. However, if one of our friends was it, they would never find us because they thought it was just a cabinet with no room to hide in. Even if they did open the door, as long as you were hiding in between the floors in the shoot they wouldn't know to look down and find you.

My house had 3 floors- a basement, main floor, and an upstairs. There were 3 rooms upstairs with two bathrooms. The main floor had the kitchen, family room, dining room, and living room. The basement had two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a food storage. The Junkyard dog (my brother), and Miss Debate (my oldest sister) lived down there. My parents only went down there in the basement to yell at my siblings, wake them up, or try to see if the Junkyard Dog had sneaked out again.

My room looked out over Gardenia circle, which wasn't much of an exciting place unless Junkyard dog was pelting neighborhood dogs with a 2x4 or the neighbors across the street were shooting their potato gun.

My parents did have a pretty good garden in our back yard consisting of: corn, 6 foot high tomato plants, strawberries, squash, cucumbers, pumpkins (which were accidently grown under the backyard deck when we dropped pumkin seeds between the cracks while carving them), and a few others which I can't remember. We also had an apricot and walnut tree. There was some ivy my parents grew in the backyard to mainly fill in spaces between the plants and garden. However, the ivy quickly took over the whole backyard. I can't count the number of balls and toys that I lost in that ivy. Someday, some kid is going to have a Christmas-like day when his dad chops up the ivy and finds all the surprises I left there.

We had a fence which bordered neighbors on all sides. My dad, Principal P, believed that all people should have fences in their backyards, mostly too keep their scroungy dogs and their poop out of our yard. He despised people who would let their dogs run free in the neighborhood for others to clean up after and take care of. Maybe that's why Junkyard Dog was never punished for pelting all of them, only for shooting them with B-B guns.

Our front yard had a normal sized lawn with my mothers roses next to it. The lawn looked a little better than the back lawn mostly since that's the lawn Principal P could display to the neighbors and all those who passed by. One summer he had a war with the grubs in the front lawn. I think he won since the grubs never seemed to come back. I recall him taking my whole family out on the front lawn not by our own choice to dig up grubs. Look up grubs on google sometime when you're bored- they're pretty disgusting.