English 9 Memoir

English 9 Memoir

Seth Vander Pol

    During December of 2010, my dad got a call from his friend Mr. Van Der Puy. They would call each other from time to time, and we’d visit them or they’d visit us. But this call was different. He was asking if my dad wanted the job as a fourth grade teacher. At first my parents weren’t sure, we just got done remodeling our house, had little pets, and lived in a pretty nice area.
    A couple nights after the call my dad and mom both called me to the living room after my siblings were sleeping.  My dad said, “Hey Seth, there’s something very important we need to ask you. What would you think of us moving up to Prinsburg, Minnesota?” We thought about it for a while, visited the school in December, then about a month later we made our final decision. We were going to move up to Prinsburg, Minnesota in late May and early June. I was going to go to Central Minnesota Christian School, instead of Unity or Western Christian down in Iowa.  We didn’t tell my siblings or the people in school for a while; we kept it a secret until about four weeks after school got out. Everyone was awestruck and for the next few weeks they were constantly asking many questions about the big move- what was going to happen and where we would live. Even though I didn’t really have any clue what my classmates were like and where we were going to live. So after school got out and we graduated from 8th grade, we had a class of sixteen in a pre-school through 8th grade school with the big graduation ceremony. More than three hundred and fifty people showed up for our graduation.

About three or four days later, we got everything all packed up in boxes. We called  the relatives and we rented the biggest U-Haul that you can get, about four relatives with pickups, one with a trailer for hauling our lawnmower, dirtbike, and fourwheeler and all of our lawn equipment, and loaded all of the boxes up into the giant U-Haul. We stacked everything inside front to back with some things that still wouldn’t fit, even though we stacked everything neatly and very compact. We had to put our valuables into a relative’s SUV to make sure they wouldn’t break on the bumpy ride.

We put our cat, Puddles into a cat carrier, loaded the fourwheeler, dirt-bike, and lawn equipment up on my grandpa’s trailer, and headed out. I rode in the U-haul truck with my dad, Spencer, and the cat. My uncle accidentally stacked a lot of the heavy boxes toward the ceiling of the truck, so corners were crazy, it felt like the truck could roll any second. And as for giant bumps, they were pretty awful too. The shocks on the back of the truck would spring up really high, (the rear tires felt like they were practically off the ground) then the back would thump down really hard, with the shocks bottoming out, with a big thud.

    After the long journey North to Minnesota, we rented a house by Bunde. This happened to be Ryan Brouwer’s old house. I loved living at this house. However, it was just one bedroom short and a little small for our family. Staying at the Bunde house all day was getting pretty boring without much to do so I rode my dirtbike about every day because there was no television, no wi-fi, and no fast internet. We just had slow broadband internet that we had limited use on. I could barely log onto Facebook because of the super slow internet!

I picked rock for Jeff Ruschen for a couple weeks to pass the time, which was okay because I had something to do and was able to make some good money instead of sitting around the house or riding dirt-bike all day. I also went to a party or two to get to know people beforehand. After about a month of all of this we finally found a pretty nice house on the edge of Clara City.

My dad talked to the police working around Clara City and asked if I could ride the dirt-bike to and from my house to out in the country. Then school started and I met many more people, but yet I still knew a few people from going to Kye Jouwstra’s party and going to the Fourth of July festival at school. I made a bunch of friends up here in so little time. Everyone is very nice and generous up here. Coming to Minnesota was one of the best things I could easily say I have ever done.