The other day I did a freewrite and my childhood home in Sultan, WA came up in it. I wanted to know if my memories of it were accurate, so I went onto Google maps later to see if the river was where I remembered it in relation to the house. I was surprised to find that it pretty much was. I don't put a lot of stock in my memory. But here are some other things I remember about the Sultan house.
My mom's best friend Penny would come over often, or at least in my memory it was often, and she and my mom would sometimes pee at the same time. The house had two bathrooms that opened up to one another. So my mom and Penny would pee at the same time, with the door open, carrying on their conversation. At least, that was how I remembered it. When I looked the house up recently to test my river memory, the pictures I saw of it on Zillow weren't anything like I remembered. It didn't appear that the bathrooms were connected like that, and the whole thing looked so much more open, so much more like a...like an Airbnb. Modern, spacious, impersonal.
Well, today I was looking again, trying to find a floor plan to see if I really was all wrong about it, and I found an older listing of the house, and lo and behold:
Memory vindicated. I almost started crying, because that memory is precious to me. I noticed the dates on the older listing and the dates on the newer listing and realized the house had been flipped. Bought for about 300k in spring 2020, remodeled, and sold for about 500k in fall 2020. The changes are nice enough, but they removed some quirk. How will two friends pee side by side now?
I really wish that both of those toilets in the picture had the seats lifted up, because another thing I remember from this house is that one of the toilet seats had images of different types of toilets on the underside. I feel as if I used to spend hours looking at the different toilets, imagining which one I would want in real life.
I have, at this point in my life, probably spent more than two hours in total looking for that toilet seat. If one can think it, it exists somewhere on the internet, right? I would be eternally grateful if someone found that image for me and shared it here. I have searched for "types of toilets image/poster/graphic," "retro toilet seats," "novelty toilet seats," "toilet seats with images of toilets," "types of toilets throne," and many more. I've added throne because my only distinct memory of the types of toilets pictured is that one was a fancy throne toilet. I'm no artist, but I tried to draw the basic idea of what it looked like:
Other memories from that house:
Holding our cat Amanda when she got spooked and leapt away, shredding my leg in the process. The scars are still slightly visible some 33 years later:
slightly visible scars.jpg
Stargazing with my dad.
Picking blackberries in the backyard.
Riding my bike down the sidewalk and the wheel getting stuck between the sidewalk and the grass. Flipping over the handlebars to land on my face. Going to the hospital because we thought my nose was broken (it wasn't).
Standing in front of the microwave, using it as a mirror as I brushed my long hair after a bath.
Hearing an animal cry one day when we got home from church. Following it to find a lamb stuck on the wrong side of the fence.
I don't remember how long we lived at that house, but I think we lived there when I was 5 and 6. Maybe a little younger and a little older, too. I got some of my first porcelain dolls when we lived there. My mom gave me a ceramic cat that she painted when we lived there. We had our dog Shamrock, and briefly, Cedar, but Cedar and Shamrock didn't get along and he had seniority, so we rehomed Cedar. We had the sister cats, Amanda and Kneader, and others too, but I don't remember which ones we had at that point, and which came later. I'm only sure of Amanda and Kneader because of my scars.
I have other memories there, but I associate them with photos or with other people telling the story. These ones I'm sure came from me.