And The Chimney Came Tumbling Down

The little doll house did not have all happy memories. The violent temper tantrums of my husband, his controlling ways and the desperate lack of money and alcoholism were just a few things that I can look back on with no fond memories that’s for sure.
However, I have many happy memories about that house. Memories that make me smile and chuckle and shake my head thinking, “Only a teenager would think of this.”
We lived in this little house for about three or four years. In that time, I made very close friends. We had so much fun. The two closest friends were older than me by a few years and had small children. I was of course, younger and had no children. My friends and I were of the heavy set class, all of us weighing in at way over two hundred pounds.
We often met at my house for coffee because I didn’t have a car some of the time to go places on my own. One day I had a marvelous idea. Most people that know me know that when Lu says she has a marvelous idea, watch out!
Well I had a laundry room attached to this little three room house that had a piano in it and a wringer washing machine. It was a pretty big room, but in one corner there was a humongous chimney. I reasoned that if the chimney was not there, I could have more room and it would look so much nicer. The girls agreed with me. So the next day after my husband went to work (we knew he would never go for it) we gathered up sledge hammers and started banging away at the chimney. All of a sudden there was a loud no I would say deafening noise and a terrifying site. The chimney was falling into the wash room and was going to kill us. All six hundred pounds of us were trying to go through the doorway at the same time. It is funny we didn’t kill each other just trying to escape, let alone the chimney killing us.
After the air cleared, low and behold there was a hole in the roof about eighteen inches square. We were so smart, but had not thought about the top part of the chimney smashing down as well as tearing the roof apart.
The thought of my husband finding this huge hole in the roof was horrifying. I ran next door and explained the situation to my neighbor man who knew the temper thing. He fixed the hole, shingled it and the girls and I cleaned up the mess in the laundry room. I waited that night to see what was going to happen, but nothing did. He was so self absorbed in television that I avoided what could have been a really bad situation. Oh by the way I put scatter rugs in that room and it looked like a million dollars when I got done with it. When the girls would come over after that day, someone would say something about the chimney and we would laugh and laugh, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, “Wow, am I lucky!”