My House is a Very, Very, Very Fine House

When I was a little girl, we lived in the downtown area of my home town, in a row house.  We lived in the top half of the row house and another family lived under us.  The entire block lived this way.  Looking back on it, I think it was a cool way to live, although I'm not sure I would want to live with those same neighbors these days - now that I'm old and crotchety and set in my ways, all finicky and spoiled in the way old ladies get.  I've gotten used to living in the sticks where it's fairly quiet and always silent at night, save for the wildlife that every now and then chitchats with one another.  Or at one another.  Back to the row house.  My maternal grandparents owned a corner grocery store and it was on our corner.  They lived in a house around the corner from us, which was deadly because my mother and her mother had a very tense and ugly relationship.  My grandmother was very demanding.  VERY demanding and my mother and her sister were her puppets.  She would call our house and say to my mother, "I'm going to let you take me to the beauty shop/doctor's office/friend's house/downtown you name it."  That was the match that would light my mother's fire.  She would go ballistic and scream at my grandmother and tell her she already had her day planned and then the arguing would escalate and my mother would eventually buckle.  Not a healthy relationship.  I'm not going into more of that relationship - I'll save it for another day.  The family who lived under us in the row house included 7 kids.  In a two bedroom one bathroom row house.  That's the way we lived back then.  We never thought we needed one bedroom per child.  The father in that family came home every now and then - always drunk.   The family who lived beside us was a retired couple with a grown son.  The Mr. had a bad little habit of getting drunk, taking his clothes off and sitting on the front porch smoking a cigar.  His wife would freak when a neighbor would call her and you could hear her shrieking at him to get back inside.  The neighbors directly across the street also had an alcohol problem and would fight just about every weekend night over something or other.  One of the fights involved a pot of coffee that one of the adults had attached to a rope and hung out the kitchen window in an effort to aggravate the other adult members of the family.  They were drunk by Christmas morning every year, and somehow their fully decorated Christmas tree always ended up somewhere on the street  or sidewalk by daybreak.  The police frequently visited that house.  Surprise, surprise.  Another family was a mother, adult daughter and young son living on the top floor of the third row house from us.  The mother had the habit of going on her front porch in her bra and just sitting.  Another neighbor across the street owned a monkey, who got loose one day and went through some of the neighborhood houses, tearing up everything he could get his hands on.  It was a hot summer day, in the time before air conditioning so all doors and windows were open and my mother remembers hearing the monkey throwing china  and other breakables in our neighbor's house.  This was not Mr. Rogers neighborhood, but it was a great neighborhood for observing people and their lives.  And apparently a neighborhood where a lot of alcohol was needed.  We left this neighborhood when I was 7 and moved to the house my mom still inhabits.  This house was built by my dad and what a great house it is!!!!  Houses carry a lot of good memories, bad memories, and secrets.  Just like people.  I live in the orange house here with red windows - the one on the hill.  I learned a long time ago to live on a hill, not a valley.  When you live in a valley, water may get you.