Many Childhood Memories in This Old House

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As many of you know I grew up on a small farm on the Hi-line. Me and my siblings grew up in a small farmhouse and when we were still very little my dad decided to build onto the house, so he bought a house from a friend of his and moved it to the farm when I was roughly five years old, so 50 years ago. We figure the house was right around 130 years old. Though my dad never used the house to build onto the farm house, it sat on our farm until a few days ago. We decided it was time to tear down the house and do a controlled burn as over the years it started to fall down because of weather and age.

My brother Michael had his two sons fire flaming arrows into the pile to start it on fire. We lived to play in that old house, and as I watched it burn, so many childhood memories come flooding back. The old house was our pirate ship and bank robbery hide out. It was our girls' clubhouse, because boys are stinking and we didn't want them around all the time. It's also the place I learned that as a human you really can't fly like a bird, even if you have cardboard wings. Let me set the stage: it was the summer of 1974 and my two older sisters Jeanne and Cathy decided it would be cool if they strapped cardboard wings to my arms and I could fly off the top of the house. For some reason being nine years old I thought that would be fun. Well, needless to say, when the time came to fly, I chickened out, but my sisters pushed me off the building anyway. In all fairness, I did fly for few seconds, that is until I opened my eyes and pulled my wings, also known as my arms, down to my side and plummeted to the ground like a 100 pound rock. Let's just say there was an incident when I hit the ground, I didn't break any bones, but it didn't end well for me.

Getting rid of the old house wasn't a total downer because my nephews Liam and Langston found two silver dollars in the wall of the house as we were getting ready to burn it. My brother-in-law David told us that his dad had always told him that is was common to put a coin in the wall when you built a house to prove that you built it. And there is also a belief that by doing so, the house would be prosperous. One of the sliver dollars is from 1888 and the other is from 1891. These will go into my brother's coin collection along with other old coins found at the farm over the years. At the end of the day, it was a little emotional to see the old house disappear. Is there anything in your life that holds many memories for you that you've had to part with or get rid of?