Movin' On Up

The yard we have on our corner in Woodbury Heights is pretty big, and we can extend that by going into the woods. If you include the Avis’ yard next door, it’s even bigger. I’m on the Gerber’s property a lot too, so my world is quite large.
Our house, on the other hand, is pretty small. It’s gotten a lot smaller now that there are six of us. When it was just Mom and Dad and me and Whee-Zee, well, there was plenty of room. Carl came along and we all had to make extra room, and now we’ve got to find some place to put my little baby sister.
Everything is on the first floor. You enter our house by the back door. It’s really the side door, but we call it the back one. Everybody but strangers come in the back door and through the kitchen. The kitchen isn’t very big, and when there’s more than four people in there it gets pretty cramped. When Dad has card games on Saturday nights, it sounds like there’s a hundred people in the kitchen.
The living room isn’t too big either, but we cram friends and neighbors and relatives in there on Christmas Eve and other festive times, and somehow they all seem to fit.
There’s only one bathroom. There’s a lot of waiting your turn, a lot of “holding it”, if you know what I mean.
Me and Carl have our bedroom right next to the bathroom. We each have a bed, a bureau apiece, and we both have an army footlocker to keep toys in. There’s also a little desk that has those cubby holes in it to hold lots of little things. Of course, we have a closet. You know, THE CLOSET, the one that has a life of its own. I know I’m older now and I should know better, but I swear there’s something in there at night. Stay over some time and listen. At least I don’t sleep with the hall light on anymore. That week at Aunt Bette’s farm cured me of that.
Mom and Dad’s room is across the hall, and that’s that.
We do have a basement. The cellar as we like to call it. The cellar is cool in the summer and pretty warm in the winter. It’s a place for us to run around in when it rains, a place to have birthday parties and New Year’s Eve parties, and other family get-togethers. We set up our model trains down there, and I build my models on the old bar that Dad brought home. It’s red and curved, and us kids play Western Saloon around it.
There is an attic, but it isn’t finished. It’s a wide open space that seems enormous to me when I’m up there. The floor just has plywood placed around where Mom and Dad store things. My old hobby horse is up there, and Carl’s old baby coach, and there’s a cedar chest. The attic is where Mom and Dad hide our Christmas presents, and where they put other junk that we don’t have any room for.
So where are we going to put Cheryl Ann? She’s a girl, and little girls can’t share bedrooms with their brothers. We can’t have the bunk beds up all year. It would be too hot for me to sleep so close to the ceiling in the summer.
Mom and Dad tell us that when the weather gets warm that they will have the attic converted into bedrooms and storage space for us. Me and Carl will move upstairs and Cheryl will get our old room.
Upstairs! We’re gonna move upstairs. It’s exciting and scary all at the same time. We have a choice of separate rooms, or we can share a room like we do now, and we’ll have an extra bedroom.
I have to think about this. Moving upstairs, away from the comforting sight of Whee-Zee sleeping in the hall. She’s too old to climb the stairs.
The ceiling’s gonna be too low for our bunk beds, so the thrill of my winter hideout will be gone forever.
I’ll be far away from that pesky closet and all of its dark secrets.
There’s gonna be a new closet to contend with. Maybe this one won’t be a dark hole to the spirit world, and I’ll be able to sleep with both eyes closed.
I think I’m gonna like this new room upstairs.
I just hope they build us a bathroom, those stairs are pretty steep.
I don’t want to be “holdin’ it” all night, you know?