Week 15: Fire
OK, I've slipped another day in the challenge. I am now 8 days behind. In my defense, we had to take our dog in this morning for surgery for a cancerous lump and I was pretty bummed most of yesterday. The dog is doing fine, despite the large shaved patch on his rump, and I'm feeling much better except for all of the sleep I lost last night, worrying. This week's challenge was "Fire" and I've got very little except a small family story.
My parents owned a little house in the town of Sedro-Woolley Washington from about 1949 to 1965. I do mean little. The hotwater heater was in the bathroom which was between the two bedrooms in the house. The house next door was so close, on Google Earth you cannot see a space between them. But we had good neighbors and enough of a yard that my father decided to add to the house. I assume he got permits but this was about 1959 so maybe? In any case, he added a bedroom in the back, a utility room next to that which served as passage to the bedroom as well as a home for the washer and dryer, and he built a fireplace into the eastern wall of the living room. He put built-in bookcases on the left and a wood box on the right that opened to the outside so you could stack wood in it from the pile outside and then use it in the evening without having to go outdoors. I loved that fireplace, and I was heartbroken to discover that sometime in the last 55 years, someone took it out.
I have not been in the house since 1965 so I don't know if the bookcases remain. Maybe the fireplace turned out to be a hazard, I don't know. But for me, their construction is a warm memory of the ingenuity and let's-get-it-done attitude of my father, Cecil Prewitt.
My parents owned a little house in the town of Sedro-Woolley Washington from about 1949 to 1965. I do mean little. The hotwater heater was in the bathroom which was between the two bedrooms in the house. The house next door was so close, on Google Earth you cannot see a space between them. But we had good neighbors and enough of a yard that my father decided to add to the house. I assume he got permits but this was about 1959 so maybe? In any case, he added a bedroom in the back, a utility room next to that which served as passage to the bedroom as well as a home for the washer and dryer, and he built a fireplace into the eastern wall of the living room. He put built-in bookcases on the left and a wood box on the right that opened to the outside so you could stack wood in it from the pile outside and then use it in the evening without having to go outdoors. I loved that fireplace, and I was heartbroken to discover that sometime in the last 55 years, someone took it out.
I have not been in the house since 1965 so I don't know if the bookcases remain. Maybe the fireplace turned out to be a hazard, I don't know. But for me, their construction is a warm memory of the ingenuity and let's-get-it-done attitude of my father, Cecil Prewitt.
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