The House at the Bus Company

I grew up in the house at the bus company in Monticello.

Dad found creative ways to use school buses:  digging the pool.
Apparently the bus was supposed to pull out the tractor.  It worked.

My dad grew up in the house at the bus company too. He left to go in the service and for a time lived in Maryland and then overseas. While he was overseas, my mom lived with my grandparents; I was born in those years. So my first home was in the house at the bus company.

When dad came home, we went to a different house. My first home was just west of KMart at the end of W. Seventh St. When I lived there, there was no W. Seventh St. I'm not even sure W. Seventh St. was an idea yet. There was no Interstate 94 either. That didn't come until the year we moved to the house at the bus company.

The first year we lived in the house at the bus company, I went to Kindergarten. My sister planted her tiny folding lawn chair in the corner of the lot and waited for me from the time the bus took me to Kindergarten until the bus brought me back home. For the rest of the day, we played School.

Staci's graduation party at the bus company.  Cory and Joe attended.

I moved out of the house at the bus company in 1988 when I left for St. Kate's. I never moved back home, staying there for a few weeks during the summers and over holidays. In January 1991, I moved into an apartment with my new husband, and have made my home with him ever since.

Our engagement party in the house at the bus company, 1990. 
I slept in the house at the bus company for six more nights.

My boys spent many of their early days in that house.  They came with me to work as long as they could.  When it was time for them to eat, we went in the house, unless Grandpa Gordy could convince them to drink a bottle.

Baby Adam letting Grandpa feed him, 1991.  Dad held all the babies in his office at the bus company.

As they got older, they needed something different than a day spent at the bus company, so my sister and I shared a nanny, who helped mom mind my boys and Staci's daughter.  Their early lives are tied to those same rhythms as mine were.

Lots of babies had their first rides at the bus company - not only relatives, but
nervous parents and their soon-to-be Kindergarteners too!

The house at the bus company isn't there anymore; dad gave it to a young couple when the boys were little. They moved it to Hasty, Minnesota. Their payment was to fill in the hole left by the house.

Adam with Auntie and Uncle Fun, Christmas 1992. 
Haleigh was born a month later.

Mom and dad moved to a different house in 1995.  Dad loved that new house, probably because it was the first time he found the peace that being away from the bus company brought.  He's in a new place now, a happier place. 

Yet part of me still lives at the bus company.

I've spent part of nearly every waking day at the bus company. The rhythms of my life follow the rhythm of the school year - the school day.  It would no more occur to me to take a vacation in September or May than it would to shave my head.  My life and my work became indelibly entwined until I could no longer define myself as something apart from the bus company.

I can now.

I am not my job.  Who I am is completely, wholly, and wonderfully separate from my job.

What I do every day, just like what everyone else does, is a job.  When I look at these pictures and remember the events that shaped me, I recognize it is not the place these things happened that matters.  It's that they happened with people I love.