The Little House - woods, creek, .....

 

Grandmom and Grandpop Kwick's house.

This is the way it always looked to me.  However, in 1947 it looked like this, before the front porch and garage were added.

                         "Here we have the little cottage" it says in Ruth Berlin's handwriting.

In 1947 this pre-fab house came on a truck to Naaman's Road.

I have the floor plan with notes on modifications, bills, etc. to document the occasion.

I always knew that my parents moved out of the upstairs of the Brown House in 1947 when I was a few months old, but it seems that everybody else moved out of that house around then, too.

The back of the Little House had a clever feature.  See the chute?  It directs beer cans into the bin under the porch.  The three-pronged drying rack on the right hand post was also in frequent use (kitchen towels).  The round thing on the left post is a thermometer.

To grandkids and other visiting young relatives, the most important feature of the house in the summer was the creek.  (pronounced "crick" please)
I do remember these individual rocks.  really.  Especially the ones in the second picture.
We spent a lot of time jumping from one to another, arranging to fall into the water accidentally on a regular basis.  We caught minnows and skate bugs in tin cans in the creek,too.

And then there was the woods.  The controlled woods on the house side of the creek.  The woods with flowering bushes and bulbs planted near the rocks.  Huge piles of leaves raked up and burned in the fall.

And endless mowing.  

I can remember Grandpop mowing a *lot*.  With a push mower.

In one corner of the woods, near the creek, but farthest from the house, we kids built many very small fires, sometimes big enough to cook hotdogs.  It was there that we pitched our big tent one summer. I think the tent and our camping experiments should have their own blog post some day.

We did spend a lot of time in Grandmom's woods when we were small.

I love this picture, as much for Grace's caption as anything.

 Gerda in her woods.

Then I just recently found these pictures that say 1952 on them.  It looks like Grandpop (Nils) was still clearing and maintaining this woods when he was 77. (!)  We know this tree was in the back of the Little House because the concrete well cover shows in the second picture.  The trellis is a good clue, as well.

Apparently these woods were pretty important to my grandparents, too.

There are also memories and pictures of events inside the Little House, but those can wait for another day.