Cub Hill House in Maryland

This is a front view of our old house (built in 1740) in Maryland.  It's called The Cub Hill house and the neighborhood around it is called Cub Hill. 

    There are 2 acres of land attached to this house, the remains of acres and acres of the original farmland that was sold off for development. That's when my husband's parents bought the house and the 2 acres. The house was a wreck and they spent a long time making it habitable, living in it all the while. They couldn't afford to buy the other acre and a half where the barn was located, so another person bought that. The property was overgrown and his parents bought several goats (male goats are very stinky) to chomp on the underbrush until they finally had space for a lawn. Parts still are wooded area, but there is a large front and back lawn. 

Another part is where there was a quarter acre garden that I planted and took care of and canned the produce. We moved in (with two children) to help his older parents take care of the place because it was getting to be too much for them. Then we inherited it. But we were both working full time, so no more garden. 

This is the front of the house which used to face Old Harford Road (when it was called The Harford Road, but over the years the road has moved away from the house and now runs along side it. Because of that, we never used the front entrance, just one of the three back entrances to access the back yard and the car parking area. 

When my husband died, I knew my granddaughter and I couldn't keep it up ourselves. (it was a huge job to shovel out to the road during snowstorms) So I sold the place and moved to California where my children are now living. (yay - no more snow) 

Remembering the 1960 sit ins, and how things were still bad in 1968

 I went to grad school in Kentucky at UK in 1967-8. I worked part time at a downtown department store and often grabbed a bite of lunch at the lunch counter nearby. By that time it was way after the 1960 sit-ins and everyone was supposed to be served at lunch counters by then. Well, I sat down next to an elderly black guy and the waitress soon came over to take my order. I had noticed that the guy beside me had been trying to get her attention for some time to make his order, so I told her that I'd wait/ he was first. It wasn't until later that I realized that she had been ignoring him but was serving white people only. She probably took one look at "college girl with long hair probably a hippie" and realized that I was serious when I refused to let her serve me first.

Beach Day - Florida v. the east coast

We would drive down from Maryland to the Florida Panhandle to visit my parents during our children's Thanksgiving Vacation time. 

When we went swimming in the (warm to us) Gulf on one of the Florida Panhandle beaches reserved for the Air Force (permission granted by my brother), some 'official' looking guys drove us and yelled at us, "What do you think you're doing?" We shouted back, "Swimming." They simply shook their heads and drove off and we continued with our beach day. (we were the only people there) 

It wasn't until we visited them one August that we realized why those men were worried about us. The water was bathtub Warm! At Thanksgiving time, the water in Florida seemed normal to us because it was the temperature of ocean water off the coast of New Jersey and Maryland during the summer. 

Your place in space

 Do you get lost easily? I hardly do. (but when I do I get really discombobulated) I usually know when I'm going north or south (north is up. I actually feel that I'm going up when I go north and definitely feel I'm going down when I go South). 

I also have precise visual spacing. (when my husband packed the car for a trip there was stuff left outside the car that he couldn't figure out where to put. So I'd pull everything out and then everything fit. Not only that, but the kid's car busywork and toys were on top and the snacks were accessible.)  

My second child had no sense of direction. She'd call me late at night saying she somehow found herself in Pennsylvania and couldn't find her way home. So I'd pull out a map and direct her.  

My husband would ask - how much further to go. So I'd say = about one inch. He had no idea what one inch on the map meant time wise. On long trips we would trade driving responsibilities. Once when we were on a trip, he directed me to drive across a bridge INTO the next state. No we weren't supposed to go that direction. From then on he preferred to drive and let me do the directing. (Let's not talk about the time I was the one who accidentally got us headed across the Hudson river into New York City. No, we didn't want to go into the city. We were headed home and he should have taken the second exit (to the west) instead of the first exit (to the east) that got us to a bridge toll station. This confusion must happen all the time at that spot because they actually had a turn-around there so we could get going into the correct direction.