This Is Where We Used to Live: Part 3

In continuing my trip down housing memory lane, we come to this little house that we lived in when we returned to Dixon in 1991. We lived here until 1993, when our landlord sold the house, and we moved to a different rental house a few blocks away. My apologies to the lady doing her landscaping that Google Maps caught!

 

This place looks somewhat different, but also very much the same as when we lived there. All that landscaping was not there when we rented it, it was just grass in the front yard. The next door neighbor's home was all sand and cacti back then, as you can see it still is in the photo. My brother and I adored this, as we were really into the Nickelodeon show "Hey Dude," and the house next door provided the perfect backdrop for our pretend dude ranch (our bikes that we rode up and down the driveway were our horses). If I had to go back to one of the houses we lived in and live in it now, this one would be a contender. It was a one level ranch with a large eat in kitchen, big dining room (that was all pretty marble tile) that opened up to the living room. Down the hall was a bathroom and three bedrooms, and then a second bathroom off the master. My room had a really nice, shady window. For one of my birthdays my parents bought me a desk and a typewriter, and I'd sit under the window and type up teen fiction. Our yard was really nice here too - it had a patio and lots of fruit trees. In the summers my brother, cousin and I would play deserted island outside for hours, climbing the trees and plucking down ripe plums and eating them still warm from the sun.

 

I'd love a house like this now. It had big windows and fruit trees, and the yard wrapped around both sides of the house, which would be plenty of space to set up a garden. Plus, that huge dining room/living room would be perfect for cozy evenings with family and big parties with friends. It wasn't a huge house - I'd guess maybe 1,500-1,700 square feet? But it just really epitomizes that nice, open California ranch style house. And I have a lot of good memories of being a kid and pre-teen here.