Playing around in Google Maps Street View, I stumbled across the house I lived in in Bremerton, Washington when I was 4 years old. We lived here from late 1973 to mid 1975. And amazingly, 35 years later it's almost exactly as I remember it!

This is the same house that I drew in this drawing that I drew in 1974 on the back side of a letter to my grandma. The drawing is of the back of the house, since I spent a lot of time playing in the back yard.

My brother Kevin and I shared a bedroom on the top floor, my bed was next to the top window on the front of the house. We had a playroom on the back side of the upstairs and I got in trouble one day for drawing a giant picture of a bowl of grass in crayon on the wall.

The window on the left was my parents' room, the window on the right was the living room. The kitchen was in the back left corner. There was a laundry chute in the living room closet that went down into the basement. I got in trouble one time for dropping my brother down the laundry chute.

We only lived in this house for 18 months but I have a lot of memories here. This is where I think my fear of spiders really developed. I also had a bad reaction to a shot and lost the ability to walk for 3 days. This is also the house we lived in when I learned to read. I still remember that vividly, my (bearded!) dad was reading "Goldylocks and the Three Bears" to me as I sat on his lap. I was following along, and suddenly in the middle of a paragraph on one of the pages on the left, all of the markings on the paper suddenly made sense and I started reading aloud and finished the book myself.

I do remember the hill in the back that leads up to Forest Park being a lot taller, but of course I was only about 3-1/2 feet tall at the time. :) The townhouses inthe background were not there, of course. Along the treeline in the back yard was a blackberry bush. I used to play back there and pick blackberries off and squish them between my fingers, then get in trouble for all the stains.

Our trash cans were lined up against the north wall of the house in front of that carport. One day my Beagle, Popcorn, bit me (probably because I'd pulled his tail or something.). Mad about this I decided "to give him to the trash men" so I put him in one of the trash cans along with some grass to eat and closed the lid. Fortunately for Popcorn the neighbor lady in that white house on the right side of the above picture saw me do it and called my mom. I hated the neighbor for that since I got in trouble. (Now, of course, I'm very glad she did it!)

This was the house across the street. I could swear it was painted a darker brown back then but I can't say for sure. The people that lived there at the time played loud music and had friends over who drank beer out of bottles and cans. So, in my mind, they were baaaaad people! :)

I've lived in at least 13 different places but there are only 3 that I regularly have dreams set in, and this house is one of those 3.

With this discovery, now I'm going to have to look to see if I can find any of my other childhood homes,