This is what it looked like. . .

Hard to caption these, though many of them seem to come from the mists of antiquity.

What strikes me is how different my view of them is now that I'm an adult. I remember thinking our house was plain and ugly because it looked nothing like the flat-roofed, space-age designs of the '60s. You were supposed to have a new house, not one of these. The house is still there, but has been converted into a doctor's office, which means the inside must be entirely ripped out. When we first moved in I was three. Walking through the empty house, I wondered how we were ever going to live without furniture.

Rocky, yes. . . I've already written about this sturdy little cow-pony, who had more character than breeding. I still love telling Rocky stories. This is probably the time I put him out in the back yard with Willie and the cherry tree, and he broke loose and galloped all the way back to the stable.

Willie, well. . . he was a beautiful but temperamental dachschund my Dad was conned into buying by a breeder. He was already seven years old and turned out to be an ineffectual breeding stud with a lousy temperament, the worst pet imagineable. My Dad was a complete idiot.

The Sunday-go-to-church one, well, this is pure Leave it to Beaver, isn't it? Like something from Hilldale (or wasn't that Donna Reed? My brother and I, trying to make her human, called her Donna Peed.)