One of the things I complain about the most is having no help in choosing a career/direction for my life.  I went to a very small rural school and even though I was assigned the agriculture teacher as my counselor he was actually anything but.  I think every one of those he “guided” was told to be a farmer. He simply didn’t take that responsibility seriously. I don’t know if it was any different for the other students who had different teachers? Probably not…

But looking back on my life there were several clues that, if I weren’t a hormones driven teenager, I could have discovered some serious hints.  One of those was my passion of writing. I loved writing down stories and learning new things about the world to write about. I effortlessly got A’s in english composition even through college. That should have told me what I should be concentrating my education on but I didn’t have a clue back then.

Another strange thing I have had throughout my life is the ability to remember the floor plan for every house I have ever lived in. Even the one we left when I was five-years old! I counted them up recently and I have lived in sixteen different abodes. I’m sure some of the floor plans are out of scale, especially those from my younger years, but the placement of the rooms I believe is accurate. That should have told me that I was destined to be an architect. The possible career paths were there, I was just too young to see them.

For this post lets concentrate on house number four. It is shown in the picture here and was a couple of miles outside of the small rural town of  Monrovia Indiana where I went to high school. I recently took a trip back through many of the areas there that I once trod. We rented this house for only about two years but it remains of one of my favorites. This was where I had my first large veggie garden. The house had two large barns on the property which were torn down probably years ago but for the most part the house itself remains the same.

The house was heated by a humongous coal furnace in the basement that needed constant attention. Most often dad could not afford to have coal delivered by the ton so he bought fifty pound bags that lasted a few days.  That was supplemented by wood from the aging apple orchard behind the house and any scrap we could find.  The house originally had no in-door plumbing so there was an outhouse still close by. Sometime before we rented, a lean-to was added to the back which contained a toilet and shower but we still on occasion used the outside one.

We had some good times there but when dad found a cheaper rental behind the gas station in town we moved. More on that tiny little house in a future post…