Forever Home

I've left the beautiful Spring weather of Virginia, taken a harrowing ride up 95N, and now am visiting my Dad just outside of Philadelphia where the dogwoods are in full bloom! If Virginia was bursting with the color of cherry blossoms, Pennsylvania is vibrantly alive with the pink and white of dogwood trees - and I caught them just at their peak! One of the wonderful things about Spring in the Northeast is that most of the flowering trees have the courtesy to bloom at different times, so when they all cooperate, you get a new explosion of color just about every week!

I had a couple of hours free this afternoon, so I took a trip down memory lane and back to the neighborhood where I grew up to see if the pink dogwood that was planted when I was born was still growing in the back yard of our house. And to my great joy and almost child-like delight, it is! Not only is it still there, it's thriving and now taller than the house! You can see it here, peeking over the roof just behind the chimney - it's gorgeous!

Now, lest this blip, based on the height of the tree, be a commentary on my very great age, I will quickly change the subject and talk more about the dogwoods tomorrow! I will say, however, that somewhere in the dusty photo albums on my Dad's bookshelves is a picture of me, about a year old, sitting in our backyard under this very same dogwood tree, then also a baby, both of us looking pink and expectant and bursting with the promise of Spring and a long life ahead. To that end, I'm happy to report that although both of us are now much older, many years wiser and perhaps a bit weathered, we're still surprisingly pink, wondrously expectant and forever filled with the promise of yet another Spring - with many more to come!

Not surprisingly, there have been many changes in the old neighborhood, but our little house has held its own and remains essentially the same. When it was built in 1960, it was the largest home on the street; now, 50 years later, it's one of the smallest and certainly one of the most modest. During various housing booms in the 1980s and 90s, when property values along the Main Line were soaring, the trend was to tear down the older homes and build up new "McMansions," as my friend Brian disapprovingly describes them; there are several of them now along our street, one more spectacular than the next, yet all looking somewhat awkward and out of place. Maybe it's just my own resistance to any change that might impair my childhood memories, but I'm greatly relieved that, although my parents sold their house in the late-80s, our home escaped the bulldozers and managed, with just a few "tweaks," to accommodate a new young family with kids of their own.

Nobody was home today, so I walked around the property, stopping short of peering in the windows or walking up onto the back porch. Perhaps I was afraid of what I would see when I glanced through the glass. Would my sister be at the dining room table doing her homework? Would my mom be in the kitchen, wearing her apron, cooking dinner? Would my dad be sitting in his big red chair by the fireplace with our favorite German Shepherd at his feet? I couldn't take a chance that those things are no longer there, that time has somehow forced this place to move on, leaving only memories inside, because those are the things that, for me, make 1539 forever home.