Joan Steacy's Studio and Blog

This is me as a teenager, just goofing around in the junkyard. My dad wasn't very organized with tires, they were randomly stacked everywhere! The house in the background was our first home, which was quiet small with just one room we all shared, and at the time this picture was taken my dad used it to store more junk. We had no plumbing til the early sixties, that's whats so funny about this picture - we really didn't have "a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of!" which was one of my dad's favorite expressions. 

You can imagine how difficult it was for my mom  raising four kids, but the wood-burning stove kept us warm in the winter and I don't remember ever going hungry. We eventually moved out of that little house into to a bigger one, that still remains today. That's where my brother Ed lives now, he's a hard working guy just like my late Dad, the salt of the earth. It's always comforting to visit him in the summer, and I consider myself very fortunate to be able to return to the place I grew up. Who would have thought I'd be writing about it all these years later?