Mom and Dad's Duxbury House

The house I grew up in on Tremont St was a small Dutch Colonial with a large circular driveway and beautiful field rock walls and stairs. Our one acre yard abutted a small swamp where we skated in the winter with our neighborhood friends.
We first went to Mrs. Clark's nursery school with ritz crackers and canned orange juice for snacks. Next we went to Duxbury public school for kindergarden; the hardest things we did there was getting our snow suits and mittens and boots on to leave. We also napped on the tile floor on a thin rug; that was hard too. I was Mary in the Christmas pageant we had wearing my mother's blue silk scarf on my head.
Grade school was next, in third grade I had Miss Paulding who had been my grandfather's, my father's and my teacher. She hit kids with a pointer in the bathroom. The town gave her a party when she retired; her gift was a new Pontiac sedan from Duxbury garage to replace her 1935 Buick. Grandpa Walter owned Duxbury Garage and had the Pontiac dealership.
Growing up in this house was not easy. My two sisters and I slept in the master bedroom, the walls were not plaster board but some form of cardboard used during the war for construction. Good for drawing on but, lousy for privacy. At night, I would say my prayers as fast as possible, accept a wet kiss from my grandmother and lie awake counting the rooms in my house compared to Sherry's or Pam's or Mrs. Day's across the street. As much as I could stretch the six rooms of my house my friends always had bigger homes, they all had more money.
Thus, began my interest in buying houses. I rode my fat tired second hand American bike up the hill past Mill Pond figuring how to buy the Sander's house; it was on the market for $28,000. I was twelve.