My Life as Annie’s weekly Time Travel Tuesday asks us this week about our first home:

This week we will travel back to our first home… was it your very own apartment, or a home with your new spouse? What memories do you have from that first home? How did you make that first house (or apartment) a home?

We were still in college when we got married: I had one semester left and Jim had two. So our first home wasn’t too far from the college. The semester before we got engaged, we were looking for housing and heard about one of the professors who had a few mobile homes that he rented out to students. When we contacted him, all of his available housing was already occupied, but he was considering buying another. When we left for Christmas break (and our wedding!) we weren’t sure if that would all work out, but thankfully by the time we were married and came back to Greenville, he had purchased the home and made it available to us.

Our very first day in our new home, though, which happened to be Christmas Day, we heard loud banging on the door early in the morning. It was the man who owned the trailer park. Somehow no one had told him we were coming, and he didn’t allow renters! We contacted our landlord and they got together and worked things out.

The trailer park landlord was a small elderly man, but he ran a tight ship and drove through the trailer park several times a day to check on things. He didn’t allow for loudness and partying and junkiness, so it was a pretty quiet, pleasant place. So many trailer parks are treeless and sterile looking, but this one had an abundance of trees and felt more like a cabin in the woods.

The home itself was a typical mobile home: pretty nondescript on the outside — white with green trim — and inside all the typical (for that time) dark wood paneling. The kitchen area had a cute bay window where I could display a few knicknacks and hang potted plants. The sink overlooked the living room, so we could be together even if I was working in the kitchen. There were two bedrooms, one of which we used for storage, and one bathroom.  The kitchen was yellow and brown: yellow is not my favorite color, but our dishes had yellow flowers, so it all went together. It was furnished except for the spare bedroom. Over time we added to it in newlywed style with a lamp here, end tables there, a bookcase my husband made, a rocking chair he bought and put together, a few wall decorations we had received as wedding presents, adding a few more things we purchased or I made over the years.

We had thought we would be moving out of the area after graduation, but the Lord kept us in town for 14 years. Our first son was born almost five years after we were married, and we transformed the storage room into a baby’s room. We then bought our first home (a fixer-upper, which is all we could afford, but that’s another story) when Jeremy was about fifteen months old. So we had six years all together in the little mobile home. Though far from a “dream house,” it was cozy and safely nurtured a beginning little family.