My Story in Lists|Places I've Lived (Part III)

Even though I was sad about leaving Puerto Rico, all my friends had left or were leaving around the time we were leaving. Dad's work was finished in Ponce and we were headed back to the states.

After a quick pit stop in California, we packed ourselves into our fake wood paneled station wagon with dad's 240Z in tow and headed across the states to Illinois where dad's next assignment was waiting.

We stayed for a short time at the house of one of dad's co-workers while mom and dad hunted for a place to stay. Not an easy thing for Californian's who were used to confined yards with brick or wooden fences. Like much of the Midwest at the time, there weren't many homes with enclosed backyards and I remember part of the allure of the house we ended up at, in a town called Bollingbrook was the small split log fence.

We were so excited because it was the first two-story house we ever lived in. I felt like a member of the Brady Bunch.

We arrived in Illinois in the summer so much to our surprise school was already in session for the area. Due to overcrowding, the district had instilled year-round sessions in which areas were sectioned off in quarters, each one would go to school for 45-days and then have 15-days off. Because our area was already full, they put us in a different schedule then the rest of the neighborhood. The kids loved to taunt us when they were off and we were on. Poor Vic, for some reason, got the brunt of it. Luckily the school wasn't far from us, but in the winter time, when the wind would blow the only way to avoid the pelting stinging snow was to turn around and walk to school backwards. That easily doubled the time it took to get there. But it made for good times imagining myself to be the true Laura Ingalls.

The most exciting night of our lives was the night we went to bed knowing that it was going to snow for the first time. We went to bed and woke up with the same anticipation as Christmas. There were little ponds around us that would freeze over and children would go ice skating. Eliz did that at least once, but poor, poor me, didn't have a pair of ice skates to my name so I make do with a makeshift rink that we lucked into when the water hose in the front yard burst. We had a blast sliding around the ice pretending to be ice skaters.

Before we knew it, it was time to move back to California, back to our little house on Peckam Drive. And little house it was. It was as though the house had shrunk because the room Eliz and I shared as little girls no longer felt big enough. The neighborhood, too, had changed. During the time we were gone, most of our friends had moved, too. While we made other friends, it wasn't quite the same.

By the next summer we were packing up again, preparing to head further east to a little state known as Delaware.