Our New Home

Richard and DuWayne Craft
setting on the front porch

The house dad built sat on a hill over looking a small valley, with a creek flowing at the base of the hills. The setting was beautiful. A winding dirt road led down to the house and the house sat, mid ways up the hill.
At one time it was the site of another home, which had burned down long ago.
When dad decided to built a house, my bother-law Dewey, helped out a lot. Dad used blocks to build our home, and some of the blocks he used were from buildings that had been torn down. They were different color, green, pink blue and white.
Well it was like this, dad was a brick layer, and he and my brother-law Dewey did some brick work in the area. They laid bricks and blocks in some of the schools in the surrounding area. Someone had given dad, some used blocks one day and he started building a stock pile of used and new blocks. This is what dad used to build our new home with. It was our job to clean the old concrete off the used blocks; they had to be clean before they could be reused.
One day we were sitting around cleaning off the blocks, and Richard is out in the yard picking up rocks when he let out a big cry, started yelling and jumping up and down, and with each yell, he got louder and louder saying something stung me, something stung me, something stung me, he took off running, finely someone was able to catch up with him and found out that he was stung by a scorpion. After mom and dad got him calmed down, everybody went back to work on the house.
This was a four bedroom home dad was building , it had a living room, kitchen & dinning area together, there was a plan for a bathroom but it never got put in. Mom and dad’s bedroom and the living room were the only rooms that were partitioned off and sheet rocked. Blankets hung between boys and the girls bedrooms. My sisters Lynda and I had our own bed, no more waking up with our sister’s feet in our faces.
We had no electricity or running water.
Dad had dug two wells at the bottom of the hill; we had to carry buckets down the hill to fetch the water and to bring it back up to the house.
We had kerosene lamps for light.
Heating and cooking was done on wood stoves.
Dad had to build a new outhouse, it had two holes, and we were up town now.
It was a grand place to live. There were trees to climb and big rocks to play on and a creek to swim in. It was a big Play ground for us kids.
Time was hard and tough but that seem to bring us closer.
We have a lot of good memories of this place.
My little brother DuWayne was born In March 1958
I believe this is the place where we all bonded together.