I live about 20 minutes away from the house I grew up in. I drive by it about once a year. It’s been overhauled and renovated into a two-story duplex.
Lotsa memories, but it ain’t home any more.
So, so true.
How much everything changes. My grandmother’s house, where I played as a child, is now a parking lot for an airport - not a whole lot to see there nowadays.
None such luck here. 1205 13th Ave. in Monroe Wisconsin still stands, and since it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, it probably will for a long time, a monument to how our parents did jack shit for us kids so they could afford to live in their “dream house.”
Not quite the same, but I spent a few years as a kid on a military base in Germany; CFB Lahr. Those were some of the most amazing years of my life, and there is a bit of a special bond between people who have had the chance to live there (or at the sister base, CFB Baden-Sollingen). It was HOME for three years, and as much a HOME to me as the Canadian town I’ve spent most of my life in.
The base closed down in 1994 and was basically left to ruins. Canadian personnel had be stationed there for 27+ years, and suddenly not only was the base closed, it was crumbling away. Upwards of 10000 Canadians - perhaps as many as 15K, I don’t know - had lived there at any given time, and now that community was completely gone. It was so hard over the years to Google and find images of familiar buildings falling into ruin; broken windows, graffiti, plants and weeds invading the buildings. The grocery store, the high school, the youth centre; it was like a bizarre war zone.
A handful of years ago, though, some developers made arrangements with the German government to rebuild on the base property. The buildings were old, probably full of asbestos, mercury, lead and there were serious environmental clean up issues to deal with, which is why it took so long for anything to get done. Now, the old buildings are being torn down, entire sections have been razed for condos to go up. Some of the buildings exist in a new form, though: the foundations and materials from the original walls are being re-used for rebuilt condos, and the new buildings share a footprint and general size - as well as a few design elements - with their predecessors.
I had the opportunity to revisit for the first time this past summer. We rented a condo to stay in for a few days: the section of the building we were in was approximately the old science class rooms of Lahr Senior School (the English-language high school). We had windows looking out on what had been the soccer field and running track; it was now full of new construction condos and duplexes. Across the parking lot, the old École General Georges Vanier (the French-language high school) was about to reopen as condos; the Arts building the two schools shared was already open and livable. The youth centre building remains in it’s original form, now an art gallery, and still retains the old Canadian military sign that designated it, K-31, as it’s name.
Walking around those old streets was one of the hardest things in my life - everything I had known was gone, with only shadows and traces of what it had been.
But at the same time, it was - finally - alive again. CFB Lahr is no more, but it is becoming something again.
You can’t go home again, just as you can’t go back to your childhood. But, like us, home sometimes grows and changes, and turns into something just as beautiful, if you only know how to look at it.
My Dad died about two years ago and my Mom had to sell the house I grew up in because she could no longer live there alone. I figured that was it, I’d never see it again.
However, the young family she sold it to were nice enough to friend me on Facebook so from time to time I get to see pictures of the house in its current state. And what’s more, the wife is a fan of mid-century style, so she’s slowly restoring the house to what it looked like in its 1960’s glory. It now looks more like the childhood home I remember than it did when my father was still alive.
I got very lucky … .
I’m only 25 so my hometown hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. But since moving away they have built a HELL of a lot of drive-through coffee shops. You literally can’t drive more than maybe half a mile in any direction without hitting another coffee shop. And that depresses me.
Not nearly as much as your depressing story though. Dang…