SNGF - A Season of Change

This past weekend's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, courtesy of Genea-Musings, asks us to think back to when we were 12 and to describe some of the fun activities we did.

If Randy had asked about any other age, I probably couldn't have distinguished between one year from another, but age 12 was definitely a time of transition for me. From the time my parents separated when I was age four until age 12, we either lived adjacent to or with my maternal grandparents. During sixth grade, my grandparents put their property up for sale and moved a couple hours north from where we had been living. They built a new house and bought a few acres of land, though a smaller piece of property than their original one. As a result, my mother moved us 20 miles to the east to a small community that at that time was only about 13,000 people. It was substantially closer to her job and made her drive about 10 to 15 minutes, which was much less than it had been. Considering I had been going to school in a town of only a couple of thousand, it was a rude awakening.

That summer before my sister and I started at a new school was the last time we lived with my grandparents on a full-time basis. We stayed at their new house while my mother would drive the two hours north on the weekends. The weather was a little milder so we played outside a lot, helped my grandpa seal the wood beds of some utility trailers he made, rode bikes, and climbed all over the BIG rocks that jotted their property. I remember a drive to some hot springs, and a fishing trip to some man-made pond and it started to rain shortly after we arrived.

One of the things I remember most was that my Grandpa got a satellite dish, a sort of new fangled thing at that time. In order to get any television reception at all, it was pretty much necessary. He was thrilled that he could finally watch all the baseball he wanted. The other "new" thing to us was that they got their first VCR. A video store was in town, so when Grandma had errands she'd also sometimes take us to the video store for a rental or two. I remember we rented an Indiana Jones movie and Grandpa watched part of it with us. I remember saying to him that it was a great movie. His comment was, "I'll show you a great movie." Within a few days, he rented "Gone With The Wind" and sat there with us while we watched all four hours of Scarlett O'Hara's trials and tribulations. I also can recall that we watched several Shirley Temple movies, but "Gone With The Wind" still sticks in my memory today. I think it made me appreciate reading the book in Junior English a few years later.