First Apartment

For a wedding present, Bruce's folks paid our first months rent on an apartment. It was a half block off Main Street in Union City, MI. It was in an older house which had been divided into 4 apartments - 2 downstairs and 2 upstairs. Our apartment was on the upper floor.
When we first saw it, we were shocked. It had furniture, but it was not exactly clean. We had to scrub food off the sides of the table. But it was ours! Our first home.
When we moved in, it was winter. Since it was an upstairs apartment, it stayed pretty warm. We didn't pay utilities there - just rent. The rent was a whopping $75.00 a month. Our apartment had a small kitchen, a small living room, a tiny bathroom with a short claw foot tub - no shower (Bruce was a hoot in the bathtub trying to get his 6'3" crammed in there!), a small bedroom and an even smaller half-bedroom. I had never heard of a half-bedroom before, but that's how it was described to us. I think it was actually a closet with enough space to put a crib in.
We didn't even own a television, just a stereo. We played chess quite a bit, too. We finally got a television when Bruce got a job at Haas's plastics factory.
I got pregnant and found out in the early spring. I was thrilled - Bruce was not. We didn't have any insurance and because we owned a car, we couldn't get any state help. As I got bigger, the weather got warmer. Warm weather brought all kinds of surprises. The most startling surprise was cockroaches! I swear a couple of them challenged me to a fight over food. Those stupid things were huge. They stayed out of sight in the daytime, but at night when the lights were out, they came out. You could hear them on the linoleum. The worst part was walking into a dark room, turning on the light and having those nasty bugs scatter!
When we moved in, living upstairs had been a blessing because heat rises. In the summer time, it's not so much fun. We had a small oscillating fan to keep us cool. Well, it stirred the hot, humid air a bit. That summer we had temperatures over 100 degrees for a week. I thought I would die!
One day we had a bad thunder storm. I was laying down for a nap when the wind started blowing. The house swayed! Lightening crashed all around, the wind whipped the trees and the thunder sounded like it was in the room with me. I honestly thought the house was going to be torn apart.
We finally had enough money to move. We moved from one upstairs apartment in Union City to another upstairs apartment in Athens.
I'll always be grateful for our first little apartment. It wasn't much, but it was ours. And the roaches.