I'm Laughing At My Own Jokes

Chapter Three: Get Me Out Of Here!

In all of my fourteen years, I have lived in two places. For less than a year, I lived in a trailer with my mom, dad, half sister, two dogs, a cat, and an ostrich. Now unless I'm mistaken, I was alive when we had the ostrich. A relative of mine found an ostrich and decided to keep it in my parents yard, where my parents ended up taking care of it, though they told my relative they wouldn't.

(I think) I also lived with my half sister. When my mom was pregnant, my half sister tried to get my dad to put me up for adoption. Luckily they didn't since she stopped coming around not too long after we moved into the house I live in now. She lived with her mom until a couple years ago when she got pregnant with her boyfriend. At least they made a cute kid.

After that first year, we moved into a big house that was proportioned terribly. There are three bedrooms, which is enough except, they made my sister's bedroom three times bigger than mine. Other than the living room, she has the biggest room in the house. My room is a little bigger than our bathroom, which is also small.
Both the house and the trailer were in the same county. The house is only a few roads away from where the trailer was, before they destroyed it. Now there's just a corn field.

My house has two bathrooms, three bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and some other room I don't know what it is. Our basement floods and if we get too much rain, we get a pond of laying water in the backyard. We have a big yard and lots of wooded area.

A few years ago, during summer break, there was a big storm. My mom had taken me and my sister to the beach and at around three o'clock, an hour or two earlier than usual, she made us leave. We never left the street the beach was on before it started raining. By the time we got out of the park the beach was in, Mom had to pull over due to the fact she couldn't see the road through the rain. My dad calls her and asks if we're okay and if had started raining yet.

The rain let up enough that my mom could see, but the lightning had started. As Mom was driving, she got a call from my dad again. She answered and he is going into the basement with my cousin Billie, who was having a panic attack. My dad tells my mom about the trees blowing sideways, and mind you, these are tall trees and they are almost laying on their sides. Suddenly, my mom hears a crash and the phone goes silent. Mom waits a minute before the phone rings again. My dad informs my mom that a tree just fell on the house and busted through the basement door.
The storm is letting up, but my dad and Billie are still stuck in the basement, with no way out. My mom is driving carefully, as there are many semi trucks that have blown off the road, between the highways. The phone rings again. Dad and Billie got out of the basement. He informs my mother that it was not a tree that fell, but a limb the size of a tree fell from our dying oak tree. Though she's happy it wasn't the whole tree, as the whole tree probably would've crushed half of our house, she was scared of the damages. I remember finally getting on our road and seeing one of our pool floaties a few miles away from our house. We didn't know for sure that it was ours until after we got home and saw that ours was missing. We pull into the driveway and as we see the front yard, we gasp. And when we got to the back yard, we realized that the front yard didn't compare. There was a hole going into our bathroom closet ceiling and much of our roofing had to be replaced. Luckily that was the extent of the housing damage, other than the porch which we were all kind of happy was getting replaced as it was small, old, molding, and just overall in bad shape. My dad and his friend built a new one that summer, about the size of our concrete pad, where a garage was before they tore it down, long before we moved there. They have to fix the porch again this summer as the winter makes the porch rise and we can't close the door.

Often when I tell people where I live, they know it or have been to parties there. The guy who owned it before us had lots of parties and we still find glass from the bottles. It's dangerous to walk barefoot in my yard.