At one point, we moved into a house on Montgomery Street. I don’t remember the address, or even the city. I think it was in Spokane. I just know that it was easy to find because “Montgomery” is a long word, so the street sign was longer than the other ones around. Easy-peasy! It was the first house I had ever been in that had locks that used a skeleton key! I’d been using normal keys for a long time, but never made out of skeletons!! Okay, fine, they aren’t made out of skeletons, and I don’t really know why they call them that, but I thought it was the super coolest. The outside doors had normal locks, but the inside ones had skeleton keys!
The first night in this house was crazy. There was a huge lightning storm and I swear the lightning was extra blue! Imagine moving into an older house, finding out in the daylight that it has old doors with skeleton key locks, and then when darkness comes, there is booming thunder and blue-flashing lightning! I’m pretty sure I thought it was haunted or cursed for at least a whole day. I found out that it couldn’t really be haunted later.
The other “feature” of this house wasn’t really the house, but was a neighbor. This was my first exposure to a real-life cat lady! Not the mentally unstable “I feel like a cat, so I must be made out of cat” kind of cat lady, but the mentally unstable “I don’t have people in my life, so I’ll get 20-something cats and pretend like I am fulfilled” kind of cat lady. They were EVERYWHERE! I don’t think that Brad or I ever went inside the house, but you could certainly smell it from several houses away. It was super disgusting. My parents encouraged us to make friends with the lady, so I seem to recall we had a couple of conversations, but what I really remember is the nose-abuse stench of that horrible place. God help you if you were down wind; you could smell it from the end of the block! The cat lady is how I know the house wasn’t haunted. No ghost would stick around smelling the stink of that lady’s house! Word of advice: solo is fine, but don’t ever become a cat lady!
It was at this house that had my first (and only) ride on a moped! They don’t really exist nowadays, or not in their primitive form, at least. Now they are pedal-assist e-bikes. Back then, it was basically a bicycle that has a teeny tiny gasoline engine on it, and pedals for when it didn’t work, and of course, the pedals were right by the motor, so burnt legs were a good sign that the motor was working! I feel like it is one device that I am glad was evolved out of existence. There was a guy that lived somewhere in the neighborhood that had one of these. I’m not sure how old he was; I would guess he was an older teen. I’m not sure, but one day he said I could take a ride on it and I was stoked! Of course, it didn’t run right and so I seem to recall him having to pedal more than the motor motored, but I still felt privileged.
I don’t recall living in that house for long, so it must have only been a few months, but that is what I remember of it!