| Biographical Non-Fiction posted January 3, 2024 | Chapters: |
1 -2- 3... 
|
  |
The Shelby Family gets settled in Chattanooga.
A chapter in the book Living the Elusive Dream
New in the Neighborhood
by BethShelby
My husband, Evan took an early retirement. We left New Orleans after 17 years and moved to Chattanooga. We've bought a house and moved in. Our oldest daughter was married and living in Florida. The twins were around 22 and Connie was in early teens. This will be the second chapter in my third book which deals only with the Chattanooga years. I just publised the New Orleans years. It was called Grasping the Elusive Dream. This one will likely be called Enjoying the Elusive Dream. In the last chapter, our real estate lady is anxious for our son Don to meet her daughter, Kimberly.
January 1988
Those first few days in the new house were fun. We had always lived in smaller houses before. For the first time ever, we had all the room we needed and more. Unfortunately, during the move, we hadn’t managed to get rid of enough of our excess baggage from past moves, so we did what we always did and stacked it in unopened boxes in our oversized garage. No one had ever taught us how to declutter. We’d learned from past experience, if we tossed anything, we would need it the following week and would have to go buy it again.
That was our excuse, but of course, we’d long ago forgotten what was in those boxes. We were from a generation who believed in not throwing anything away unless it was falling apart and couldn’t be mended. We also thought styles recycled every twenty years but failed to take into consideration waist sizes sometimes change.
The one drawback to the garage was, although it would hold two cars and had enough extra room for a basketball game, using the left-behind goal attached to the ceiling, the driveway was up a steep hill and you couldn’t drive straight into the garage. At the top, there was a sharp right turn with inadequate turning room. This meant one of our cars would often be left sitting outside and we would have to back a long way down the drive to get to the street.
As I said before, Jane, our matchmaking real estate lady, hadn’t stayed long when she came to visit on New Year’s Eve. She had been so disappointed she didn’t get the chance to introduce her daughter to Don because both had accepted other invitations for that night.
It was an engagement party for one of Don’s best friends who he knew from when he’d attended college in Tennessee. Don had been asked to be the best man. Fate had to be working overtime, because the girl he was marrying had roomed with Jane’s daughter, Kimberly, when they were in an academy near Nashville. She had invited Kimberly to be her maid of honor. Without her being aware of it, Jane’s wish was coming true. Don went over to sit on the piano bench and sing along with the pretty auburn-haired girl playing the piano.
Later that evening, both Don and Kimberly went home to announce to their parents, they had met someone interesting. Chattanooga isn’t a village. It is a city. So we could only scratch our heads in disbelief over such a coincidence.
When the wedding took place later in the month, Don caught the garter tossed by the groom, and Kimberly caught the bride’s bouquet, but this is getting ahead of the story.
Back to the house, Don and Christi had downstairs bedrooms across from each other and shared a bath. Connie had an upstairs bedroom with its own bath and Evan and I had a huge master bedroom with a sitting area, real wood burning fireplace, and a balcony overlooking the neighborhood. The great room was sunken and featured a 27-foot vaulted ceiling and a rock fireplace with a chimney which reached the ceiling. A long balcony led from the top of the two-landing stairway, past Connie’s room and into our master suite. This was no cookie-cutter house. It had been designed by an architect. It was amazing we managed to pay a cash amount of $93,000 and we were finally debt free.
Our lot was large and right away my farm-raised husband started making plans to fence the backyard and make a garden. At that point, he had no idea how many rocks he would have to dig from the earth.
It took a while for us to get to know the neighbors. They may have assumed we were the Beverly Hillbillies moving in, since we’d rented a large U-Haul and moved ourselves rather than pay someone to do the work for us. The people next door were Mormons with six children and it didn’t take the little one long to come out of the woodwork and start using our steep drive as a ramp for skateboarding. They also played basketball in front of our drive because the family who sold the house left another basketball goal on our property.
The family in the house near the foot of our driveway, we wouldn’t meet until I’d backed down our drive and used their mailbox to stop my car. They were nice enough when Evan went over to tell them he would be recementing it into place. The couple both worked and the husband was an airline pilot and often slept days.
We were one of four houses in a cul-de-sac and the house across the street was a rental and it would be years before we met any of the people who lived there. We were right on the edge of Tennessee. The subdivision behind us was in Georgia. When we realized kids from Georgia were using our yard for a shortcut, Evan was more determined than ever to build a fence.
We had only been moved in a week when we had what Chattanooga thought of as a ‘once in a century’ snowstorm complete with lightning and thunder. It was then we learned that people who live on steep hills need plenty of bread and water in emergency reserve, because you won’t be going to the grocery store and you’ll likely be without power. Luckily the power outage lasted less than a day. It was five days later, when a sand truck made it into our neighborhood, and the mail finally came through.
The kids and I were delighted with the snow. The snow was six or seven inches deep, and it was beautiful. To Evan’s embarrassment, we took garbage lids and slid from the top of the hill in our backyard all the way down the drive and into the street. I’m sure this kind of undignified activity from someone old enough to retire like my husband must have confirmed we were indeed hillbillies. Of course, to us we were actually flatlanders from New Orleans having just moved in to hillbilly country, and we were only trying to fit in with our new peers.
Christi and I both had jobs and we had to let them know we wouldn’t be there. We weren’t the only ones who couldn’t make it to work. Like I said, it was a rare storm.
Jane, the realtor, in order to make sure this new relationship didn’t falter, had invited us all to lunch the following weekend. She seemed impressed she had sold her first house to people who were able to pay in cash. They lived further down in the country so there was still snow everywhere when we made the visit. It was pleasant enough and it seemed Don and Kimberly were getting acquainted at a rapid pace.
The next thing on our agenda would be to get Don enrolled in Life Chiropractic College in Georgia and to make arrangements for Evan to drive Connie to school each day.
There would also be an assortment of pets in our near future, but I’ll leave these animal adventures for another chapter.
My husband, Evan took an early retirement. We left New Orleans after 17 years and moved to Chattanooga. We've bought a house and moved in. Our oldest daughter was married and living in Florida. The twins were around 22 and Connie was in early teens. This will be the second chapter in my third book which deals only with the Chattanooga years. I just publised the New Orleans years. It was called Grasping the Elusive Dream. This one will likely be called Enjoying the Elusive Dream. In the last chapter, our real estate lady is anxious for our son Don to meet her daughter, Kimberly.
January 1988
Those first few days in the new house were fun. We had always lived in smaller houses before. For the first time ever, we had all the room we needed and more. Unfortunately, during the move, we hadn’t managed to get rid of enough of our excess baggage from past moves, so we did what we always did and stacked it in unopened boxes in our oversized garage. No one had ever taught us how to declutter. We’d learned from past experience, if we tossed anything, we would need it the following week and would have to go buy it again.
That was our excuse, but of course, we’d long ago forgotten what was in those boxes. We were from a generation who believed in not throwing anything away unless it was falling apart and couldn’t be mended. We also thought styles recycled every twenty years but failed to take into consideration waist sizes sometimes change.
The one drawback to the garage was, although it would hold two cars and had enough extra room for a basketball game, using the left-behind goal attached to the ceiling, the driveway was up a steep hill and you couldn’t drive straight into the garage. At the top, there was a sharp right turn with inadequate turning room. This meant one of our cars would often be left sitting outside and we would have to back a long way down the drive to get to the street.
As I said before, Jane, our matchmaking real estate lady, hadn’t stayed long when she came to visit on New Year’s Eve. She had been so disappointed she didn’t get the chance to introduce her daughter to Don because both had accepted other invitations for that night.
It was an engagement party for one of Don’s best friends who he knew from when he’d attended college in Tennessee. Don had been asked to be the best man. Fate had to be working overtime, because the girl he was marrying had roomed with Jane’s daughter, Kimberly, when they were in an academy near Nashville. She had invited Kimberly to be her maid of honor. Without her being aware of it, Jane’s wish was coming true. Don went over to sit on the piano bench and sing along with the pretty auburn-haired girl playing the piano.
Later that evening, both Don and Kimberly went home to announce to their parents, they had met someone interesting. Chattanooga isn’t a village. It is a city. So we could only scratch our heads in disbelief over such a coincidence.
When the wedding took place later in the month, Don caught the garter tossed by the groom, and Kimberly caught the bride’s bouquet, but this is getting ahead of the story.
Back to the house, Don and Christi had downstairs bedrooms across from each other and shared a bath. Connie had an upstairs bedroom with its own bath and Evan and I had a huge master bedroom with a sitting area, real wood burning fireplace, and a balcony overlooking the neighborhood. The great room was sunken and featured a 27-foot vaulted ceiling and a rock fireplace with a chimney which reached the ceiling. A long balcony led from the top of the two-landing stairway, past Connie’s room and into our master suite. This was no cookie-cutter house. It had been designed by an architect. It was amazing we managed to pay a cash amount of $93,000 and we were finally debt free.
Our lot was large and right away my farm-raised husband started making plans to fence the backyard and make a garden. At that point, he had no idea how many rocks he would have to dig from the earth.
It took a while for us to get to know the neighbors. They may have assumed we were the Beverly Hillbillies moving in, since we’d rented a large U-Haul and moved ourselves rather than pay someone to do the work for us. The people next door were Mormons with six children and it didn’t take the little one long to come out of the woodwork and start using our steep drive as a ramp for skateboarding. They also played basketball in front of our drive because the family who sold the house left another basketball goal on our property.
The family in the house near the foot of our driveway, we wouldn’t meet until I’d backed down our drive and used their mailbox to stop my car. They were nice enough when Evan went over to tell them he would be recementing it into place. The couple both worked and the husband was an airline pilot and often slept days.
We were one of four houses in a cul-de-sac and the house across the street was a rental and it would be years before we met any of the people who lived there. We were right on the edge of Tennessee. The subdivision behind us was in Georgia. When we realized kids from Georgia were using our yard for a shortcut, Evan was more determined than ever to build a fence.
We had only been moved in a week when we had what Chattanooga thought of as a ‘once in a century’ snowstorm complete with lightning and thunder. It was then we learned that people who live on steep hills need plenty of bread and water in emergency reserve, because you won’t be going to the grocery store and you’ll likely be without power. Luckily the power outage lasted less than a day. It was five days later, when a sand truck made it into our neighborhood, and the mail finally came through.
The kids and I were delighted with the snow. The snow was six or seven inches deep, and it was beautiful. To Evan’s embarrassment, we took garbage lids and slid from the top of the hill in our backyard all the way down the drive and into the street. I’m sure this kind of undignified activity from someone old enough to retire like my husband must have confirmed we were indeed hillbillies. Of course, to us we were actually flatlanders from New Orleans having just moved in to hillbilly country, and we were only trying to fit in with our new peers.
Christi and I both had jobs and we had to let them know we wouldn’t be there. We weren’t the only ones who couldn’t make it to work. Like I said, it was a rare storm.
Jane, the realtor, in order to make sure this new relationship didn’t falter, had invited us all to lunch the following weekend. She seemed impressed she had sold her first house to people who were able to pay in cash. They lived further down in the country so there was still snow everywhere when we made the visit. It was pleasant enough and it seemed Don and Kimberly were getting acquainted at a rapid pace.
The next thing on our agenda would be to get Don enrolled in Life Chiropractic College in Georgia and to make arrangements for Evan to drive Connie to school each day.
There would also be an assortment of pets in our near future, but I’ll leave these animal adventures for another chapter.
 Recognized |
You need to login or register to write reviews. It's quick! We only ask four questions to new members.
© Copyright 2024. BethShelby All rights reserved.
BethShelby has granted FanStory.com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
