I'm not sure whether it was a mistake to stay in the place where I grew up. It seems that the older I get the more trouble I have dealing with the changes that I see occurring.
Stores that I went into as a child, hand-in-hand with my parents, have closed and fallen into disrepair.
Their parking lots remind me of cracked mirrors, broken pavement often forming craters that belong more on the moon.
Dirt piles in front of housing-in-progress have replaced trees that formed lush woods in which we used to venture as children. I remember going into the woods and finding old golf balls, an abandoned clubhouse, and sweet-tasting wild raspberries. Sometimes my childhood friends and I would come back with bagfuls of apples from an area where an abandoned orchard formed a grassy tree-filled meadow.
It's hard not to feel mean and bitter toward these new developments. Litter from the construction in progress floats across the street, and the wild pink sweet pea no longer blooms in mass colors in that area. I cannot understand why people find half- completed outlines of future homes so much better than the woods in which I loved to roam.
And today, to make things even worse, the old house that we kids nicknamed the haunted house on the hill has a for sale sign in the yard, and some members of a demolition crew are wandering around the property.
I was on my way to work, but I pulled over abruptly, stomped up the driveway and asked them what they thought they were doing. They laughed, as if overtaken by a kid on a mission. Well, maybe that's what I seemed to them.
"We were just tearing down that house over there," one of the men said, pointing across the street toward a half-torn-down structure. We figured we'll be tearing this one down soon, so we just wanted to see what kind of work we're going to have on our hands." They all laughed. I don't know how they could laugh and keep a cigarette in their mouth at the same time, but they did.
Unbidden, I followed them to the door as they trudged inside. The door was unlocked, which felt strange to me. As kids, we had sometimes been bad and climbed inside through a broken window in the back, which I was almost inclined to do just then. Of course, a big difference now was that I am an adult, inquiring about historic property, instead of a teenager looking for a hangout.
The house had fallen into more disrepair since my last visit here. The spindles to the staircase were all missing, trash and leaves had accumulated inside, and watermarks around the broken windows showed that weather had crept in and abused whatever it could.
