The Places Where I Lived as a Child

I was born in Provo, Utah.

Before starting school I lived in California and Hawaii.

When I was five, I lived in a red four-plex (the red brick house) on 200 North near 500 East in Orem, Utah. We lived in the top east apartment if you stood outside facing the place.

When I was seven, I lived in a black & white house next door to the Maestas' on 250 East and near 500 East in Orem. I went to school, down the road, at Sharon Elementary from Kindergarten through fourth grade.

We moved to our condo not too far away and lived there for a year when I was eight.

We lived in Provo, Utah when I was ten so Mom & Dad could be closer to their restaurant, "The Hungry Hawaiian." We lived at the top of the road on Cedar Avenue on the right in place that looked like a log cabin (the mouse house). We called it "the mouse house" because you could hear mice running along the ceiling. Mice were everywhere, including in the cupboards. Our house had a really big yard and a door that went from my room to the back porch.

From Provo we moved back to Orem and lived in the cherry tree house. It was a small white ranch that had lots of cherry trees outside. There was a barn in the back that had chickens and a big, black bull. We didn't run the farm, but just lived in the house. Irrigation water came at least once a month and covered the entire lawn.

We didn't live there long. We moved to another house in Orem on the corner of Center Street and Eastwood Drive (the Eastwood house.) That's where we lived when Mom & Dad packed up the house and moved to Oklahoma.

I didn't go to Oklahoma but moved in at Grandma & Grandpa's house in Orem, and finished the sixth grade.

Next, we moved to Kingman, Arizona. We lived in a ranch almost at the end of the street near a golf course. Our backyard was dirt, but, apparently, good enough for our golden retriever, Buff, who kept jumping the chain-link fence and running away. I had my own room ,and so did Lani. However, Kenneth and Maile, who were three and five, shared a room. One day, in the spring of the following year, I came home and Mom said to me, "Pack up your things, we're moving back to Utah."

We moved in at Grandma & Grandpa's house in Orem, and I finished the seventh grade. Our family of five lived with them over  the summer, then we moved to Mesa, Arizona for two weeks. Evidently it was long enough to enroll me in school. My school was made up of classrooms connected by outside hallways. It had at least 3,000 students and was the largest school I ever attended. I wasn't there long enough to make friends and don't have many memories of that time, except for cooking a frozen steak and french fries in an electric skillet in our apartment one afternoon. (It was a blessing that both Mom & Dad worked in restaurants otherwise we would have starved. I'm sure Mom wouldn't have let that happen but at least we always had food.)

After Mesa we moved back in at Grandma & Grandpa's house in Orem, and I went to the eighth grade for a couple more months.

From Grandma & Grandpa's house in Orem we moved into a place in North Ogden, Utah that wasn't quite finished. The driveway was mud and our Ford Explorer froze to the ground when Mom parked there. The house in Ogden had so many problems that I can't list them all. As an adult, I'm horrified to think about our living conditions, when I remember how it was, but as an eighth grader, I didn't see the problems.

During the summer before my ninth grade year in school, we moved to Centerville, Utah. The Centerville house was big and had a different color of carpet and paint in every room. My bedroom was golden. It was also down stairs and at the other end of the house.

On January 1, 1983 we moved from Centerville back to Orem. We moved into the cascade house (kitty-corner to Cascade Elementary.) My sister, Lani, and I shared a room in the basement that was light blue and didn't have any windows. We lived there until I was a senior in high school.

During my senior year we moved to a duplex on 1400 North in Orem. It was a lot smaller than our last house. It had just one bathroom and two bedrooms. Ken & Maile shared one room and Lani & I shared the other. Mom's room was downstairs in the family room next to the garage.

We moved back to the cascade house several months later but it wasn't the same. We didn't have the furniture we had and it felt like just a house. A few months later I moved out, permanently, with Bryan, into my own apartment down the road.