After Granny Bernadette’s house was finished on Orchid Lane, we moved there from Randall Street and began a new phase of our lives. The house was a good distance from the city limits of [REDACTED], far enough that none of the Pizza Places would deliver there. It was a modest 3-bedroom Ranch style home with a lot of open space in front of and behind it. Granny was always afraid that the area would develop around her and become boisterous, her premonition turned out to be correct as a decade or so later they put a big highway right behind her Orchid Lane home.
I don’t remember living there for a long time as I was already spending more of my time over at Granny Mabel’s. Granny Mabel was more lenient with regards to discipline and didn’t require as much of me as Granny Bernadette did. However, the tradeoff was that Granny Mabel was a worrywort and terrible henpecker. She would nag everybody constantly about everything she thought they should be doing with themselves, whether that included eating lettuce with salt on it (her idea of a salad) or going out of state for a weekend that earthquakes were supposed to hit according to some crackpot geologist.
Anyway, back to Orchid Lane. Brother spent more of his life there than I did, and he turned out to be a better person as a result. He’s more focused and disciplined and actually gets things done in his own life. He has always credited my decision to move in with Granny Mabel as one of the reasons why I have been… less than successful. Granny Bernadette required that Brother do chores like mow the lawn and weedeat. She also required him to show impeccable manners at the dinner table, another area in which Granny Mabel was lax.
To be honest I’m having difficulty remembering a lot of this period of my life. I remember playing through The Secret of Mana while I lived there, and I remember Granny almost constantly watched television. She always boasted about the amount of wisdom she had gained over the years, but I always thought that planting yourself in front of a television and watching hours of game shows and family dramas never did amount to the height of wisdom. So I suppose I shall close this portion of the journal.
I did end up back at Orchid Lane after my mental breakdown, as a place for me to rest and recuperate. A form of Sanitarium, if you will, and it was incredibly helpful in that function. I’ll write more about that period of my life as these entries advance chronologically. I’ll just say as a last bit that, as of this writing, my Granny Bernadette still lives on Orchid Lane in the same house with her Daughter. She’s made noises over the years about finding a larger house with room to ride a scooter around because she has difficulty walking sometimes, but she’s never followed through with it, largely because the rest of the family wants her to remain where she is.