My family seems to have gravitated toward stone houses and, as a child, those old houses were a delightful place to play. They tended to be cool and a bit dark, even in the summertime, especially my maternal grandparents' house since it was surrounded by forest. When my mother was still a child, her father moved the family from West Reading to an old property on the Alleghenyville road that had started out as a hunting lodge. They enlarged the cabin quite a bit over the years, adding a wing with several bedrooms and lived there for the rest of their lives. The woods were a very effective sound barrier, so the house was usually very quiet - about the only time I can remember it being otherwise were the times in warmer weather when we could sometimes hear the engines from Maple Grove speedway, miles away. Far more common, though, was the sound of song birds, feeding happily at the many bird feeders my grandmother set up outside the kitchen windows.
The house where my father grew up near Joanna was an old stone farmhouse, surrounded by fields rather than woods though there was a strip of woods running around the property border. His father had been a butcher for Armour for many years, but had always had a large garden as well. When he retired, he spent much more time on the garden and grandmother spent a lot of time putting up vegetables to last through the winter.
Though I have lots of memories of the sights and sounds of both houses, sometimes it is the smells that linger most often. Outside the bathroom window at Dad's house was a eucalyptus tree, the scent of which always seemed to fill the room, coupled with the scent of the Camay soap that always sat in the soap dish by the sink. Today, either scent can send me instantly down memory lane.