Growing Up #1: Setting the stage

I grew up on a small, 11 acre, hobby farm outside a small logging town in Washington State.  The town was a single stoplight, single school, single policeman, single doctor, small library branch sort of place where folks all knew each other.  It had a hardware store, two small markets, a few restaurants and the main phone switching facility for that part of the county.  The town had several churches and taverns and we liked to joke that the tavern to church ratio was 2 or 3 when in reality it was probably 1 to 1. Basically one of your standard, rural logging towns that are all over the western US.  Now, 50 years later, the town has become a bedroom community for larger cities to the west and while there are still several churches, only a single bar survived.

Our house was a few miles from town.  I remember that you would drive along a winding road and then down a small hill with trees on right and pasture and power/telephone poles on the left. At the bottom of the hill the road bends to the right, starts to climb a bit and you see pastures on both sides.  Our land was on the right side - 11.25 acres of pasture.  Our house is in the bottom right of the picture with the cars in the parking area below it.

The road continued for around 200 yards and then did a partial turn to the right and our red, 2 story house was there on the right side. 50 yards past the turn, you could pull into a gravel parking spot on the right. Just across the road from the parking spot was our mailbox.  The house was back about 20 yards from the road surrounded by a white picket fence.  The front of it had a large porch with two brick columns holding up its roof.

Our land was all cleared to be used as a pasture for animals and surrounded by the fir, hemlock and cedar covered lands of the neighbors.  Facing away from the road toward the back of the pasture we had a creek on the right side of the property and another creek that came in from the left side, then turned in the middle and when almost to the back where it turned again and joined up with the creek on the right side (the trees in the middle of the property follow this creek). The house was on a small hill that we had to go down to get to the pasture area and barn (above and to the left of the house).

It was a great place to grow up and learn about the world.