At 12 years old (or thereabouts) we moved from 911 1 St. NW to 1204 Grafton Ave.
As a child it was a big house, huge, main floor, basement (where I'd play with a chemistry set gifted me for Xmas, the copper sulfate and other chemicals packed in test tubes marked with a skull and crossbones), the upper floor (where the bedrooms were) and the attic, converted into a studio by my mother, where she did her sewing, painting, stained glass, etc. I remember pictures she did for myself and my sister, of us as monkeys, and a spread of Burt Reynolds from a Playgirl magazine with my father's picture pasted over the face.
We had a garage and a big yard, the back of which was converted into a garden that I was expected to weed. I remember not being happy about that. One memory, that of finding a large ashen cinder stuck to the side of the garage, pitching a stone at it to discover that it was not a cinder, it was a bat, and it fell to the ground injured and squeaking, we found a broom and put it out of it's misery...I felt terrible.
All the kids in the neighborhood would frequently assemble to play "Kick The Can", and I had graduated from collecting bottles for change to a paper route. One day while delivering papers I discovered a body, but that's a different story...
If you headed North on the street you would arrive in a few short blocks at the outskirts of town, the north edge of which was bounded by the Coulee, a stagnant stretch of water in which we could catch garter snakes, frogs, and - if we were lucky - mud puppies, or salamanders. There were a few poplar trees, in one of which was built a treehouse which we commandeered to our purpose. The treehouse was a childhood secret, and kids would find old girly magazines and we'd look through them, vaguely excited by the taboo nature of them but not really understanding, only that we were not supposed to be looking at them...
Which brings to mind another memory, of a friend who regularly went through his parents night table and came to school with the most incredible and outlandish tales of what he'd found, he had to be making this all up, didn't he?
In a few places the coulee widened, deepened, became a pond, and we'd find wooden old palettes, stuff them full of sticks and twigs, make rafts and pole about upon it like Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn on the Mississippi...
It was the idyll of childhood, only I hated Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in general, and when being unfairly punished for a poor report card or other misbehaviour would walk west upon the railway out of town hoping to catch sight of the mountains, only returning when I realized the grim reality that I was a long way from where I regarded as home, and that I was only 12 and would have to suffer the injustices of childhood for a few years yet...