Early homes

I was born August 19th, 1960, the seventh of ten children to Ronald and Edith Francis of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.  I don't remember my first home, a bungalow my parents owned on 14th Avenue.  We moved when I was two, into a two-story home on 15th Avenue.

This is what the house looks like now, or at least as of the last Google drive by, as it is snipped from Google Earth.  I remember it being a lot bigger.  It used to be pink stucco on the ground floor, with deep red natural wood siding on the upper floor.  We have always referred to it as "the pink and red house".  I guess we can't do that any more. 

I lived here until I was eight.  This was when we moved to Colombia for a year.  Just prior to that move, we lived in a rental home for three months.  It had been the plan for us to return to this home after we returned from Colombia, but we were supposed to go for two years, and when we returned after a year, the house was still being leased.  We ended up buying a small house on the north side of Lethbridge, where we lived for a year.

It still looks pretty much exactly how I remember it, except it had a crabapple tree in front instead of a birch.  This house was much too cramped for us, and my dad was soon on the lookout for larger digs.  We found this house on 6th Avenue south.

It still looks pretty much as I remember it, except that nauseating tree in front is three times bigger, and they've covered the stone front steps with a ramp.  It's actually a lot larger than it looks, as you look at the narrow end from the street.  This was a great house - roomy, lots of bedrooms, lots of storage space, and lots of cool extras and upgraded finishes.  Since it was much nicer than our 15th Avenue house, we decided to move in here and rented out the other two houses.  I lived here until I was 16, when I moved out on my own.