Prewrite+Two

 Prewrite 2  The history of First Avenue would have never concerned me. It is an ugly lot, in an ugly neighborhood. To most, this place is a junkyard. Old, dilapidated cars rest their souls in the waist-high yellow grass and prickly weeds. Tires buried halfway into the ground, an old hot tub that has fallen through its wood platform, and an old house sitting in the back corner of this lot. Most of all, this place was my home for nearly six months.  “What was it like the first night that you had to leave, Dad?”  “I had a sack of my clothes, a cot, pillow, and a toothbrush.”  The house seemed to embody death itself. The house was narrow, constricting, its windows yellowed from their years. It is made almost entirely of stone, greasy and slimy to touch. I have trouble imagining who or what lived in this house. This place was a crash site for what was our family. I consider myself lucky, I only lived there a few days of the week, but it was enough. It was enough to tell me that my happy little life at my old perfect little home in Littleton wasn’t the only life to live.  I can remember helping my dad fix up the old place. We started with the landscaping. We mowed the entire lot, picked up old rubble, and destroyed the old dungeon of a shed. I can still feel the blisters on my hands from the old wood rake I used to collect the leaves under the gnarled trees. Then we moved inside. We tried our best to make the place comfortable to live in. We had no TV, no computer, and I had no bedroom. My dad’s bedroom was a bed he had gotten from a friend, two saw horses and a piece of drywall to hold up a Stone Age computer we had gotten from my uncle. My sister, by law, had to have the one bedroom. It too, was plain and simple: a bed, bookshelf, and her belongings in her duffle bag. All of this must have been better then my room, a couch with a pullout bed.  By the time we had lived in the house for two months, we had carpeted the plywood floors, retiled the front entrance, and done away with a good amount of the junk yard's rubble. All of this time we labored on the old lot, I would wonder.  Why are we doing this? Is this really where we are going to live?  I figured that we toiled on this house because we couldn’t face it. We couldn’t sit around and complain about anything: the divorce, the house, anything, because we only had each other from now on. We worked not because we needed to, but because even though we were down, we wouldn’t let ourselves lay face down in the dirt. We picked ourselves up, brushed off, and eventually moved on. I can look back on it and say that I learned how to get through a tough time. It’s not about enduring; it’s about changing what was around us, destroying the old history and making progress.  A picture of things that are long dead and gone, worthless to most, of most importance for us.