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The House on Gillies Street4/13/2023 I spent my childhood in a Dutch Colonial house, located on a peaceful residential street, with a corner lot. The yard was surrounded by tall wooden fences along the north, a street on the south and east, and a cedar tree line on the west side. The backyard had a tree, where birds nested outside the window on the top of the stairs.
In one year, the town bought a part of our yard to convert the straight 45-degree corner into a curve. My father sold the land to the town for the offered price, knowing they would seize it and offer nothing otherwise. I recall the construction vehicles tearing up the lawn and paving the road while installing a new curved curb. On the west side of our property, the neighbor's tall tree shaded the front third of our side lawn, providing ample leaves for me to pile up. The north side of the yard was half-filled with a large garden where my parents grew green beans, rhubarb, carrots, and tomatoes. The east side had a rose garden running between the sidewalk and the gravel driveway. Across the sidewalk, there was a rock wall garden that curved around the end of the driveway and encircled half of the space where an oil heating tank once stood next to the steel shed. The south side of the yard had a retaining wall made of ledge rock slabs angled to hold back the dirt and grass of the yard, along with the town sidewalk. Once, my father got a load of gravel delivered, and it arrived while we were out grocery shopping. There was a steel shed with a sliding door next to the driveway where he kept his tools and lawn mower. In the 70s and 80s, there was a big oil tank next to the shed that was removed years after my parents switched from oil heat to electric baseboards in the mid-80s. The garden and half of the north side of the yard had a reddish-brown fence that my parents removed in the 80s, followed by the cedar tree line in the late 90s, before selling the house. Around 1987, my father built a large addition on our eight-room house, expanding it to 12 rooms and consuming most of the west side of the yard. The value of the house probably went up $25,000 with the addition, and today it could sell for over $200,000. The house was originally located a few blocks from downtown Chesley, constructed around the 1940s, and moved to Gillies Street, where my parents purchased it in the 1960s. The siding on the house was asphalt shingles, which my father replaced with board and batten siding when they built the addition. It was one of several Dutch Colonial houses in the small town of 1,800 residents. The basement was partially finished with a painted cement floor and popular 60s wood paneling, which my parents decided to rip out and move the rec room upstairs into what was previously a bedroom. The interior of the house was renovated several times by my father. A small addition was built on the house after it was moved, serving as a bedroom and living room. The front Master bedroom turned into a living room, then the living room into a study. The finished basement went from a rec room into an unfinished basement. The Master bedroom moved from the main house to the second floor of the addition, with a living room, office/sewing room, and bedroom below it on the first-floor addition. My bedroom was on the second floor of the original house, facing north. The room had two windows, but facing north, it was usually dimly lit by the sun. When I was a teenager, they gave me my sisters’ old room with windows facing the early 1900s. The town was small, but it had all the necessities: a grocery store, a hardware store, a post office, a few restaurants, and a gas station. Most people knew each other, and there was a sense of community. During the summers, my siblings and I would spend most of our time outside, playing games in the yard or riding our bikes around town. We would often walk down to the river to swim or fish. In the winter, we would go tobogganing down the hill behind the community center or skate on the outdoor rink at the arena. One of my favorite memories of living in that house was the Christmas decorations. My mother loved to decorate the house for the holidays, and every year she would put up a large tree in the living room and string lights along the front of the house. It always looked so beautiful, and it felt like a magical time. When my parents decided to sell the house and move to a smaller place, I was sad to see it go. It had been our family home for so long, and it held so many memories. But my parents were getting older and the property simply became too much to maintain. They moved to a trailer home in a community near Owen Sound. Looking back on it now, I realize how lucky I was to have grown up in that house, in that town, surrounded by such a strong sense of community and belonging. It shaped me in so many ways and gave me a foundation that I still carry with me today (it's too bad that sense of community is being destroyed by the liberal-mind virus these days).
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July 2023
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