Journaling ~ what exactly is a local household?

Life's Compline: A Journey Just Begun, a 2020 book by Betty Creamer, has questions for journaling.  This morning, I came across an interesting prompt (p. 68) that I spent time considering.

"What different local household settings have you experienced in your life?"

She put quotation marks around "local household."  I'd never thought of my life in this way.  That chapter gave us facts like:

• Over the course of their lives, people experience a series of very different living situations.
• Many people establish one or more different families.
• People often live alone for phases of their lives, especially in old age.
• Many elders have experienced changes in living situations.

So how do I enumerate "living situations"?  I tried to sort it out.  The author says it starts with "the biological family of origin."

1. Being the oldest child, I once had two parents all to myself.
2. Then we were four, with a baby brother getting way too much attention.
3. Then a baby sister came along, the sister who stole my playmate's attention.  (Do I detect a pattern here?)
4. When I was almost nine, I got another baby brother, but I was a big girl in third grade by then.
5. I married, so there were only the two of us.
6. When our twin daughters arrived, my family added up to four again.
7. The girls' baby brother made us a family of five.
8. My in-laws moved in with us when we built a bigger family house, making us a family of seven.
9. My father-in-law died, so we were down to six.
10. I divorced my husband, and his mother moved out, too.  My family was down to me and three kids.
11. I invited my mother and my Aunt Bonnie to live with us, making us a family of six.
12. (Several other changes occurred as my daughters grew up, moved out, married.)
13. My son and I moved to Knoxville when I changed jobs, leaving my mother to take care of my house in Chattanooga alone, with my help on weekends with things like mowing the grass.
14. My son chose to move back to Chattanooga and live with his dad so he could go to high school with his friends, and I was suddenly an empty-nester, alone.
15. Mother and I lived together, when I gave up that job and moved home.
16. I sold the house, Mom moved into an apartment in Chattanooga, and I lived alone in an apartment in Atlanta (and a couple of times over the three years with other students as roommates), while pursuing a graduate degree at Emory University.
17. When I graduated, Mother and I once again lived together in Chattanooga and for a year in Knoxville.
18. When Mom's Alzheimer's got to be more than I could deal with while working, she went to a nursing home and I lived alone.
19. After that, my friend Donna and I lived in the same house or apartment twice, alternating with living alone in different apartments.
20. I moved to St. Louis and now live alone in a retirement center.

Friends around "my" table at the Crown Center in 2018

Or do I?  Although I live alone in my apartment, I could say I have a HUGE family now, counting many of my neighbors in this building as my current family.  We talk nearly every day, do things together, rely on each other for help.  But would you call us "family"?  Maybe.  But either way, it definitely fits under the author's "changes in living situations."

But now I wonder ... do pets "count" as family?  I'd have to figure in a bunch of them, ending with Clawdia right now.  I'm not sure, though, whether she's "family" or if I'm working for her for free.  This morning, hours before I should have awakened, I heard a mighty tussle going on in my kitchen.  Loud enough to wake me from a sound sleep.  I jumped up, ran to the kitchen, and found that Clawdia had tackled the heavy, double layered bag of dry cat food that I'd left on the floor and had not yet put away in a cabinet.  Notice the hole in it.  How the heck did she do that?  She was declawed before I got her, and she's had mouth surgery and now has no "fangs" at all.  Her only claws are on her back paws.  But she had apparently decided that, if I wouldn't get up and feed her, she'd just do it herself, dad gum it!

Word of the Day

tus·sle / ˈtəsəl / noun = a vigorous struggle or scuffle, typically in order to obtain or achieve something.  Example:  "I found Clawdia in a tussle with this bag of Meow Mix."

Luckily, I still had the previous bag, so I was able to dump the food from this torn bag into one I could close.