Sense of place

this is a paper about my best friend mandy's house in summit county where i am from, there are some errors and this was never the final copy but i can't find it so...

A Sense of Place
The Sun breaks below the horizon and settles in for the night, the sky turns a violent orange and all who witness it from the from the front windows of Mandy turner’s Dillon home are taken aback with a sense of beautiful wonderment, this isn’t just a pretty sunset to me and my friends but this was our second home, our Mecca, our safe house, our sanctuary. A sense of place to me was the sense of home, fun and adventure that I have come to observe while having epic cuddle sessions, board game nights, and seeing that jer (our weird Jewish friend) was truly the tallest of us all, at my bet friends Mandy’s Dillon home.
Anywhere in summit feels like home to me, but they way I felt every time I stepped in Mandy’s house, I felt as if I could breath. The feeling of home, friendship, pure insane madness that was about to ensue, was the greatest feeling in the world. My friends house was always busy with activity and mischief, not the kind of mischief that evolves the police but the kind that involves pure fun! My friends were never really the type to go out and party, well at least when we were hanging out with each other, our idea of a party involved Disney movies, baking, board games, and much, much more legal fun. There was always unplanned excitement, in fact our plans never usually worked out, but there was never a disappointed face in that home. We could always go to Mandy’s her family was warm and welcoming and her parents were a second set of parents to us all.
Mandy’s house was about 25 to 30 years old, with a huge deck that wrapped around 90% of the outside, an A frame roof the didn’t go all the way to the ground. The front of the house had windows that took up the entire front and made the view and the viewer full of awe and wonder. You could see both views of lake Dillon and buffalo mountain from theses windows, and also when ever we had a function we could always tell when someone was coming up Mandy’s long dirt drive way.
The kitchen and the living room were the center of all activity among my friends and I; the kitchen was old fashioned and look like something straight out of the sears catalog, from 1973. The counter that divided the kitchen and the living room was an old lament and everyone gathered around its tan surface as we all began arriving. The cabinets were some from of very dark wood, with dishes in them that had almost, if not the same amount, as character as the house its self. There was always plenty of juice and other food stocked up for us in the fridge, and Mandy’s parents never truly minded shopping for all of us, and if they did they were always kind enough to makewe sure we didn’t know. But the absolute center piece of this kitchen was the microwave and stove combo, the stove wasn’t particularly anything out of the ordinary minus the fact that the microwave was attached. But it was the microwave itself that always became the topic of converstation. It was as old as the house, the button to open the door was a push down leaver, not an actual button, and forget about number buttons to chose how long you cooked your meal, you had to turn a dial to choose how long things were in there for. The inside of the microwave resembled a 1950’s bomb shelter, that is to say one could have probably let a bomb go off in this microwave and the surrounding area and people would come out of it without even a scratch.
The living room was where we spent the other half of our time in the home. The kitchen had opened up in to the living room, so it made it easy for all of us, anywhere from just three of us to maybe 20 at a time, to all be in the same place without being in the same place. We spent many a nights there, watching movies, playing board games and letting the world pass us by, but we never really cared that we were “missing out” on what was considered a “normal high school Friday night of drinking and regrets. There was never regret in that living room, we were always grateful for every once of food and experience we gained. The couch the wrapped around in the center of the living room would make any person, wither new to the group or been living there their entire life, comfortable and at ease; most of the time we all fell asleep on that couch or at least on the floor in front of it.
I have heard it said before that it isn’t where you choose to gather but rather who you choose to gather with, if that was the case we would gather at someone else’s house. While I did enjoy the company and it was there presence that complimented the atmosphere in Mandy’s home, it was the structure and the way things were built that made us feel at ease and at home.
A few years ago Mandy’s parents decided that they need to change. It started with adding a garage. It started with adding a garage. This in the long run wasn’t a bad thing, our friend’s band Yes We’re Open rehearsed there once it was finished and there were many other adventures, including a half naked, fever induced, ice cube and peacock feather photo shoot. But it was when they decided to pave the dive way that we felt the winds of change blowing through. It then went to the fire place, which in the long run was also a good change but it hadn’t stopped there.
Mandy’s parents began in the kitchen, they painted over the height chart, put in granite counter tops, took out the old cabinets, but luckily kept the dishes, and to top it all off, replaced the best part of the whole sha-bang, the microwave. They then moved on to the living room, they reupholstered the couch, and put brand new carpet in that had that icky new carpet smell. This isn’t to say that the remodel wasn’t beautiful and well done, it just, didn’t feel like it use to, and my friends and I are not the type of people who like change, in fact we hate change. And while we still gather there when ever we all head home for the weekend or a holiday we find that the atmosphere of our friendship is still there, it is simply not the way it used to be with out that microwave.