Mineral Springs Rd

The trailer on the full basement. We had some problems with water coming in sometimes at this place and would wake up in the morning with three or four inches of water across the entire basement. Dad moved the trailer furnace into the basement and set it up to blow air into a series of concrete blocks that were laid on their sides, a furnace repairman came once and he said he had never seen anything like this. A floor with linoleum was then built on top of this and we had a bedroom and living room down there with a utility room that had the furnace and washing machine.
I can remember crossing the driveway to my grand parents house for Christmas Eve with my fathers family. Everyone would bring something and we would hang out in the living room near the pot belly stove. Once when I was about eight or ten I ate so much pumpkin pie at one of these that I was sick all night and and still almost forty years later I avoid pumpkin pie.

My brother and I would ride our bicycles back in forth in the attached driveway and chase each other back and forth across the yard.
When they built I88 it took a small strip in the back yard and we had a chain link fence up there after that. I used to watch traffic on I88 sometimes and see the State Police practice making traffic stops there.
We would go up in the back yard and watch the fireworks in the Cobleskill Fairgrounds on July Forth. Aunt Anna’s husband Uncle Bob would bring his bee smoker and keep the bugs down while the kids played around the old wire spools that my grand father was saving up there. One year Uncle Victor got a bottle rocket stuck in his sweater, you’ve never seen a whale dance so light on his feet until you have seen this.
Grandpa Smith had a cannon that he made from a  set of wagon wheels and a hollow post from a porch. He would take lighter fluid put it in a metal coffee can, point the cannon at the hill side across the road and light the fluid. The ensuing bang would echo back off the hill side and the kids would all holler and yell. This only made him want to do it more of course. We lived such a safe life back then.