Moving On -- My Favorite Things Last Verse 5/5/2007 4:06:50 PM
Our dream came true but goodbyes are hard to say Let's have a cookout, I hardly can wait
Hungrily Tricia stands outside our gate
Life on the corner's not private enough
We'll move to Paxinos and take all our stuff
Goodbye to Ferndale and Shamokin High
Sue Dilliplane watches with tears and a sigh
Moving's a pain and we have so much junk
But we'll follow our dream as we tie down the trunk.
Yes, we liked cookouts, but we wanted to have them with a little privacy. I think we gave Tricia hot dogs sometimes but I can't remember for sure. It wasn't that she was a starving child and we ignored her, it was just that she seemed to always show up. She was a constant in our neighborhood.
We lived in a half-double, on a corner, and didn't have a hedge or anything like that, so whatever we did was public.
We dreamed of having a single, especially Bill, who had grown up on a small farm outside of town.
Paxinos was country, with little rolling hills of green. When we looked at the house in Paxinos, an old house on almost an acre of ground, we came out and sat in the car and talked about it. Our reactions were alike: "It's a dump, but I love it." It needed tons of work and eventually Bill put in new wiring, new plumbing, new linoleum, some new walls, tore one wall out, put on a new roof, siding, added a second bathroom, wallpapered and painted, tore down a shed and an old outhouse(wish we still had that) and filled in a hand-dug well. He put in a big "picnic shed" like the ones in Knoebels' park, just a little smaller. I was stunned by the size of it, thinking it would be a little patio-type area with a table. He had thought of the picnic shed they had out the farm.
I think we paid $11,000 for the house the year Cindy turned 17. We lived there 15 years and sold it for $69,000. I'd love to have that big wonderful kitchen again, but I love it here, too, even though it took me a couple years to get used to living in the woods instead of in a lush, green valley.
By the way, we moved onto Willow St. with 1 little girl, but moved to Paxinos with 4 girls and a boy!
Our kids would miss Ferndale grade school and Shamokin High. Cindy only had 1 year to go, Sue 2 years behind her. They did well, though.
Sue Dilliplane would miss us. She was a little older than our girls, but loved to come to our house. She'd talk to me a lot, too.
Well, moving to Paxinos was a dream come true, and our years there hold many memories, bitter and sweet, and our 2 wonderful neighbors, Harry and Helen Flore. I'll write about them sometime in a poem. They were surrogate grand-parents to our younger kids.
I'll finish the song officially here---
When it's quiet and I'm lonely and I'm missing you,
I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don't feel so blue.
