Facing the Past

A year ago I took a short ride to my former elementary school   We had heard the school was in a state of demolition having finally been abandoned by Fulton County.  After the county stopped using the building as an elementary school and then as a police officer training facility and then as a place to store voting machines...they just packed up and left it....all alone.

The last lesson had been taught, the last kickball kicked and the last lunch tray washed years and years before.

During the summer of 2006 I visited my old friend....my elementary school....and she was looking pretty good.   A little tired and worn out, but holding her own.  You can read about my visit back then here and see a few pictures I posted. 

However, once the building was abandoned....she took a turn for the worse.  It wasn't long before the roaches and the vermin took over...and I don't just mean the kind that crawl on four or more legs. 

Crack addicts, vagrants looking for shelter broke in.....all of the copper pipes were taken as well as fixtures of any value and old glass....doors and transoms....the very tall windows.....the types of things "they don't make like that anymore."

And at some point the community...if it can be called that....began using my school as a dumping ground.  Quite frankly, I can't call my old community a "community" because how can you treat an old building....a school that was so integral to the community for so long.....like this?

The playground was no better.

A slow...agonizing death.

You can't even drive up the driveway anymore because of the junk.   The state of the building took my breath away....

It was hard to climb those steps...the same steps I sat on as a child waiting to be sorted out for kickball teams.

.....and of course by climbing those steps I was confronting the past.

We walked the hall...the oak hall that had gleamed because James, our janitor always had the floor buffer out and working away.  

I though about that as we traversed the hallway...a hallway now littered with insulation and torn ceiling tiles...piles of trash....torn up pieces of sheet rock.  At some points along the hallway we were literally tottering on piles of debris and very uncertain as to what was underneath.....even if anything would be underneath to support us.

I walked by doors I had opened and closed as a child...and transoms now broken.

There were huge holes ripped out of the flooring revealing the dark underbelly of my school....a building that had always been safe for me, but now....was quite dangerous as we gingerly walked down the hallway.

We have to face our past sometimes...the good and the bad...just like we have to face an unknown future.  There are holes.   We might get around them....some of them we fall through.....but the holes are inevitable.   Some of us get stuck in the holes....some of us eventually climb out and forge ahead to the next pile of debris or inevitable hole.

For all the joys of life..and are there many.....there will be debris.....there will be holes.

A whirlwind of events swirled around my head as I kept going down the hall.  

Why didn't I notice him more?

Why did he die at such a young age?

Where is she now?

That was so important to me then...when did it change?

This is what is left of my fifth grade classroom...the first year I had a boyfriend....a boyfriend who actually returned my feelings.

The back parking lot where I planted flowers and other plants during my fourth grade year....you would never know that now.

My first grade classroom...the room where I read about Alice and Jerry and their little dog Jip......where I poured over Richard Scarry's Busytown books and had to sit still for math.  

 

The walkway...now overgrown where I sat as a child waiting on my mother to pick me up.

As we drove away I whispered goodbye and took one last picture.

 I won't go back.  Ever.  It's too hard to see what my school was allowed to become. 

I'm content with my memories, but I know deep in my heart I'll continue to wrestle with my questions because apparently I've reached that season of life.....

But it is hard facing the past....good and bad.

It always is....

I'm ready for the season to change.

Civil War Resources

I found the video below on YouTube regarding Antietam and thought I would share it. This creative work shows that YouTube has some really great uses in the classroom with students….if only we could get past those pesky blocks.

I also wanted to document a wonderful Civil War resource called Civil War Album. The picture seen here was snagged from CWA. It was taken on the summit of Kennesaw Mountain looking towards Little Kennesaw. At CWA you can click on almost every major battle and see all sorts of images and maps. This is a great source for virtual tours. I’ve been checking out the Jonesboro link quite a bit lately. I'm looking for any pictures that might have been taken during Sherman's march towards Jonesboro....when the railroads were torn up at Red Oak, Georgia. If anyone knows of any please let me know. I grew up there and the area's early history interests me.

Scavenging For My Past, Part 4

Last night I finally felt I could sit down and write about the visit I made to my old home site. I’ve thought about it for a couple of days and have written some things down in longhand….a section here and section there….ideas that fit some of the pictures I made….a note to myself regarding a thought I want to make sure I include, but this section of my scavenger hunt was difficult and I’m still trying to sort out why.

Part one of my scavenger hunt can be read here, part two here, and part three here.

The product I ended up with last night was Historians Observe Their Surroundings. At some point I had to make a choice…continue on the path of explaining my lesson on how history changes a piece of property or launch into my hunt for my childhood home. They are both linked but contained far too much material for one post so I opted for the lesson piece and once again put off facing my past. It is funny how some ideas just seem to erupt and tumble out of me while others stay locked in my brain and just churn away like the agitator on a washing machine.

The first picture you see is my dad, my sister, and I on the front steps that led up to our Red Oak home. You can barely see the large front porch that I wrote about a few days earlier here. I won’t tell you which one I am, but I’m not the one in the middle! History has changed the landscape behind us. The picture below shows the same view except it is taken approximately 300 feet further back and across the track. The raised plot of ground our house sat on is gone, the front steps where we sat is gone, the trees that gave our porch privacy are gone, and the house is gone………gone.



Think about the plot of land that you live on. What was there ten years ago? One hundred years ago? One thousand years ago? Ten thousand years ago? Maybe you’ve seen the more recent version of the movie The Time Machine where the main character activates the machine and you see the scenery change around him as he advances or goes back in time. It’s a really fascinating scene to me as it advances in rapid time and you see things being torn down or built up or over other things.

Think about it seriously as you move about your day…..are you walking the same steps as a wooly mammoth? Or are you sitting in the same spot a Confederate soldier lay dying? Are your children playing in a spot a young Native American child called his or her special place? Is there an old family home at the bottom of the lake you water ski on or skim across as you try to find that perfect fishing spot?

Maybe that’s what got to me this week as I visited childhood places. Things move too fast these days. During our lifetime we see many changes in the landscapes we live in. The people who inhabited the Earth before us rarely saw major changes in their lifetime or left the areas they grew up in for that matter. Many people lived and died on the same plot of land. Most of the students in my classroom have already lived in at least three places or more. Is it any wonder we have lost our attachment to our land?

As I traveled up Roosevelt Highway from Red Oak I saw the same scene I had seen as a child. Ahead of me on up the road was the green steel span of the bridge where Interstate 285 crosses the highway. We always used the bridge as a frame of reference for folks trying to find our house…..if you get to the bridge you’ve gone too far…we'd say. I reached my street which at one time was called West Point Road, but I don’t know why. It doesn’t go anywhere. Maybe at one time it actually did. In my day it crossed the track and became the drive and parking lot for the lumber yard my dad managed. It was the only way in and out of the property which caused my mom some concern through the years as she never wanted to need a fire truck or ambulance only to have a train stop on the track.

Making the right turn off Roosevelt Highway I crossed the railroad track. Once on the other side I found myself in an environment that felt so familiar yet looked so alien. Down in the very core of my soul I could feel I was in familiar territory yet nothing, nothing was as it should be. A glass recycling plant now sits on the property. Large mountains of glass bottles dot the grounds and crushed glass carpeted the asphalt.






I felt kind of silly as I walked into the office and announced who I was. The plant personnel were very kind, but unfortunately they couldn’t tell me anything. They did not buy the property from my dad’s employer after the fire. One nice man handed me a bright orange business card and said, “Call this guy, I bet he can tell you about your old house. He owned the property before us.” I said I would and then asked permission to walk the property and take some pictures. They were very nice to allow me to do that.

I walked around to the back of the plant. It was the area where the showroom had a huge warehouse with four aisles filled with all types of doors, mouldings, sheetrock, nails, etc. Customers would come around to the back where the aisle doors opened up to a very large dock where trucks and cars could be loaded up. Dad used to have large contractor dinners where he would invite all the builders in the area and their wives for steak dinners. We’d place grills on the dock and set up long tables. All the employees would stay after work and help out along with my mom, sister, and I. Dad always expected my sister and I to make nice and behave. I absolutely loved these customers….they were family….we went to church with some of them, and my sister and I went to school with their kids. Twice a year Dad would have inventory in the showroom and warehouse and even as a young girl I was assigned something to count. During annual sales Dad would set up a hot dog stand and employ my sister and I to man it. The best fun was having the whole run of the place. I used my status as the boss’ daughter to the hilt. There wasn’t a nook or cranny on that property that I didn’t know or visit daily whether on my bike or a golf cart that Dad bought for us to “play” with. On busy summer days I wound my way in and out of large delivery trucks, customer’s cars coming and going, and even obnoxiously rode my bike in the showroom saying excuse me as I edge by customers trying to choose a new bathroom sink or replacement door. I don’t think Home Depot would put up with that, but they don’t provide steak dinners to their best customers either, as far as I know.

When you visit a piece of property that has changed so drastically you look for landmarks…anything to give you that frame of reference so you can determine where past structures were. I tried, I really tried, but I couldn’t make too many determinations until I walked back out to the railroad track and looked back towards where I knew the house should be. Do you see the metal scale sticking up from the asphalt in this shot? The raised plot of ground my house sat on was somewhere right there.



As I re-crossed the track I took this picture looking back towards Red Oak.



I thought about all the times I had stood on the track looking in the same direction. I thought about all the pennies we had laid on the track waiting for the train to flatten them to flitters. I thought about how at four years old I was so scared of the train that I could hear it coming from miles away. I would go tearing into the house before it could come. It was quite sometime before I would stay outside to watch the train go by, but I eventually became brave enough. I looked around at all the changes to this plot of ground I had called home for so long and as I looked down the track towards Red Oak I remembered all along the track that stretched before me Union soldiers had disrupted the lines during their march to Rough and Ready as part of Sherman’s March to the Sea. I wondered what the land looked like then. Finally I remembered how I used to balance on the rails, one foot in front of the other to see how fast and how far I could go. So, if you had been traveling down Roosevelt Highway a few days ago you would have seen a crazy, forty-something, overweight woman trying to recapture her childhood by recreating a balancing act on a train rail. Let’s just say I’m out of practice.

On the way home I pulled out the card the man had given me at the glass recycling place. If my home exists the man listed on the card may have the information I need. Unfortunately he is out of town until after the fourth of July. Guess we’ll have to wait a few more days for more definitive information.

The night I came home from walking the old property I was thoughtful about it…in fact I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had one of those up and down kind of nights, and unfortunately hubby paid the price. I disturbed him all night long. I think he’ll be glad when my scavenger hunt is over.

As I tried over the last couple of days to write this I uploaded my pictures and got them ready to place. As I walked around the property I was really taken with all of the shards of broken glass everywhere I looked. Even though it was a devastated looking landscape compared to what I remembered the sun made all of the glass sparkle and shine, and I knew I had to snap a picture of it. I held the camera out in front of me and snapped the ground not really caring about what I snapped as long as I had a carpet of glass in the picture. Of course being the klutz that I am I managed to get my shadow in the picture so I had to crop it to cut me out of it. As I looked at my finished picture I was amazed. Do you see what I see on the lower right side? A penny! I walked that whole lot. I could have taken a picture of any spot at any time and something had me choose the spot with a penny.



I take the penny as a sign… a sign that man goes on shaping and reshaping his landscape. It’s up to us as caretakers to catalog and index how we use the land so that others who come after us can appreciate the wonderful resource that land can be. In this way all of our stories, good and bad, won’t be forgotten.

Scavenging For My Past, Part 3

Clear your mind and then thoughtfully consider your elementary school years. What do you remember? Were you the playground bully? Were you the leader of your group? Were you picked last for kickball teams? Were you on the hallway patrol? Were you a red bird or blue bird?

What were your feelings as you walked into the building each day? Was it a safe place for you or did you fear it? Did you feel loved by the adults in the building or did you feel like no one cared? Did you have a favorite part of the building?

How would you feel if you returned to your elementary school building today and was able to explore?

I attended Eastern Elementary School from first grade through seventh grade in a small hamlet called Red Oak, Georgia. Basically Red Oak is a post office stop between College Park and Fairburn. During the Civil War, Red Oak was where Union soldiers incapacitated the railroad and then separated into two columns as they marched towards Jonesboro. There used to be several buildings in the area that hinted at Red Oak’s past. The Sewell Hat Factory was an abandoned piece of property I passed each day on my way to school. It was one of just many pieces of property including plantations that the Sewell family owned in the area.

Red Oak was nice little community when I was young but began to slowly decline in the early 1980’s. During the late 80’s and 90’s Red Oak was a fairly dangerous place. A housing project had been built at the end of Campbell Drive, the street where my school is at. There were news stories all the time about people getting robbed and shot. The housing project finally shut down and later was torn down.

Currently Red Oak is on the verge of a comeback. I did a quick tax parcel check the other day (my legal background comes in handy) and I was surprised that I recognized a fairly high number of old Red Oak names. It appears many folks have held onto to their properties and it looks like they may have been actually smarter than all those folks who moved away.

I had looked for my old home all morning and had visited the old Campbell County Courthouse (see part two of my scavenger hunt here). My last stop of the day was a visit to my old school. It is amazing how you can drive up to a location where you spent a large amount of time as a child and as you motor down the road suddenly your memories take over because it all seems so familiar. It’s like your body goes on auto-pilot. As I turned down Campbell Road and passed by familiar homes I mentally stated each family’s name as I passed the homes they had long since moved out of. I felt the same familiar lurch in my body as I turned into the drive of the school that was flanked by the same old pine trees that used to greet me each morning.

The cornerstone of Eastern Elementary states it was built in 1941. It is a lovely old building that was added onto in the 1960s. The front canopy along the walkway and the front shrubbery was added in the 1970s. The outside looks exactly the same. I parked my car at the flag pole where I sat to have my sack lunch during our fifth grade picnic.



For the last several years the building has been used as a public safety training facility but as I approached the front door a sign told me things had changed. The hallway confirmed for me that I wouldn’t find policemen in the building anymore because the hallway was filled with voting machines. The same lovely hardwood floors greeted me and said a creaky hello as I walked down the hallway. Realizing there might be valid reasons why they wouldn’t want someone from off the street wondering around I quickly found the man in charge and told him why I was at his office door. Gerry M. welcomed me like an old friend. He was great…..in fact he walked around with me and I gave him the grand tour of his workplace.



They’ve placed carpet over the old hardwood floors but in my day they were simply lovely in the hallway and in the classrooms. The custodians would buff them to a high sheen. We would haggle with our teachers to get permission to work on a project in the hall. In no time our shoes would be off and we would test the slide factor of the floors.

This is a picture of Mrs. Posey’s classroom where I was for fifth grade.



Looking at the room from the perspective of a teacher it was fairly large. Notice the chalkboard and rack. They are built into the wall. Mrs. Posey always looked like a million bucks each day of the year. She had cute Jackie O. dresses with matching coats which were very stylish in the late 60s and early 70s for women her age. She wore high heels and stockings every day----she never wore pants. Her nails and red hair were always done. I used to watch her count the lunch money each day. “Click, click, click went her nails as she picked up the coins. I was mesmerized as she placed the money in the striped draw-string bags the office provided for the lunch count. When she was finished she would look up and sometimes we made eye contact. She would smile and then motion for me to come and get the bag so I could take it to the office. It was a great responsibility.

The cafeteria had been partitioned off for some reason but since the hallway doors were still in the same place we could piece together the route students took as they came in to get their trays and where they sat. I walked to the exit door to the wall where we would line up to leave. The first spot next to the door was the most desirable. The person who claimed this spot would be the line leader. Many times the “leader” would be directed to the back of the line due to the methods they had employed to claim first-in-line-status.

This is a picture of the auditorium. Up front is the stage where I made my debut as the narrator in the annual Christmas play.



During 7th grade, the first year we changed classes, our teachers would use the auditorium to show movies. These weren’t videos, but honest to goodness reel-to-reel films, usually a National Geographic title. I told Gerry all about how the pictures used to bounce sometimes, the whirring sound of the projector, and the inevitable flap, flap, flap as the film finally wound all the way through the machine.



The L-shaped library shelves, shown above, for the older grades were still in the same spot. I pointed out the locations where I would find Across Five Aprils, Homer Price, and the Beverly Cleary and Carolyn Haywood (B Is for Betsey) books. There were about six tables set up in two columns for kids to sit and read in the middle where you see all of the voting machines.

This is the classroom where I had Mrs. Olvey (third grade) and Mrs. Frye (fourth grade). Mrs. Olvey was close to retirement age when I had her. She always wore red lipstick. We had to write the pronunciations of each spelling word every week. I would sit by those windows and daydream instead of completing my work. Mrs. Frye was younger and more mysterious. She had been a nun….I had never known a Catholic before. I always wondered why she had decided not to be a nun anymore. We did a project in her room regarding birds. We even had to create and sew birds out of fabric. She made us do it at school and on our own. It was hard. My owl is at my Dad’s house somewhere.



Look at the great wall of windows. The view is exactly the same as I remember it.

I snapped a shot of the other side of the room too. I managed to get a picture of Gerry, my tour participant. It was simply a great classroom. They don’t design them like this anymore.



I enjoyed walking through my past today. I reconnected to memories that I need in my toolbox as a teacher. I want to hold fast to some of the emotions I felt as I entered the school office and saw the same counter where the secretary sat or entered the principal’s office. I need to remember the feelings of accomplishment as I mastered some bit of hard content. I also need to hold onto the frustration I felt when I was made to write the pronunciation of my spelling words. I need to hold fast to the notion that my students have many of the same emotions that I once had.

How will my students feel about their experiences with me thirty years from now? Am I doing all that I can to provide good memories?

What say you? :)

I want to thank Gerry M. and his staff for being so nice to me as I went on my grand tour. County employees get a bad rap sometimes. I know because I’m a county employee.

Tomorrow I will visit my old home site to see if I can pick up any clues to the whereabouts of my childhood home. Join me as I continue scavenging for my past!

You can see part four of this series here.

You can find my more current articles here.

Remember that you can subscribe to this blog and receive my updated posts by email when you submit your address in the Feed Blitz box at the top of this page or if you read several blogs you can click on the Bloglines button to the right. Thanks in advance for your comments!

Scavenging For My Past, Part 2

Well, I spent a good part of my morning riding up and down Rivertown Road from Fairburn, Georgia back towards the Chattahoochee River. This is a beautiful, still largely untouched area that in its past was filled with large, working plantations. Prior to white settlement it belonged to the Creek Nation.

Today was my great quest to find the location of my childhood home (see part 1 here). I decided to go slow and carefully look at each house to see if I could identify any characteristics of my former home. If a car came up behind me I pulled off so they could go around. I was on a quest and didn’t want to include unwary motorists.

The scenery along Rivertown Road runs the gamut of small bungalow type homes with small lawns to much larger homes anchored in park-like settings within the city limits of Fairburn. Outside the city limits there are clusters of homes from various time periods separated by rolling pasture land. At different points the trees break and I can see I’m driving along land that is slightly elevated. Below me a beautiful landscape stretches out that entails part of the Chattahoochee Hill County. Great things are going on in this part of Georgia including the efforts of the Chattahoochee Hill Country Conservancy and the Serenbe Community. There are some additional articles about Serenbe and one of its developers and owners owners here and here.







I traveled Rivertown Road its entire length, turned around and headed back towards Fairburn so I could analyze the other side of the road. I was a little let down by the time I reached town and since it was going on 1:00 p.m. I decided to grab a bite to eat and contemplate my next move.

The main town part of Fairburn is what you would expect for a small town along a railroad. There are several antique stores and the only hardware store in these parts that also houses the best boutique for unique gifts anywhere this side of Atlanta. The Southside Theatre Guild took over the old Fairburn movie theatre a few years back and cars fill the streets on nights they perform. Currently they are performing Godspell.



I ate lunch at Oz Pizza---two pepperoni slices and a Coke. Scavenging for your past makes you hungry, you know. As I ate I looked out onto the same Main Street I used to view as a young girl. Across the street from me were the two train depot buildings and on the other side of the buildings ran the track that belongs to CSX. The track originally belonged to the Atlanta and West Point Railroad and runs from downtown Atlanta westward.

I thought about my house and realized if it had been moved through Fairburn they would have had great difficulty making the turn to maneuver onto Rivertown Road. Maybe it didn’t happen at all. Perhaps the information I have is incorrect. The shot of Main Street above shows the right turn where my house would have had to turn in order to make it to Rivertown Road. I don’t think it could.

Main Street through Fairburn is also known as U.S. 29. During the Civil War and for a long time afterwards it was called Jefferson Davis Highway by some. The railroad tracks and U.S. 29 run parallel to each other. These are the same tracks I played on as a child and the same tracks Franklin Delano Roosevelt traveled on as he went back and forth between Washington D.C. and Warm Springs, Georgia. In fact, U.S. 29 leaves downtown Atlanta and travels through East Point, College Park, Red Oak, Fairburn and even further south. It’s common name through my old stomping grounds is Roosevelt Highway named after---well, you know….

Many of the trees are missing now but at one time through East Point and much of College Park there were Dogwood trees planted along the highway next to the train tracks. It was said that Roosevelt loved gazing out at the blooms in the Spring. They were absolutely beautiful as I remember.

As I finished my pizza I decided to not let the day end in defeat. I decided to go over and visit the old Campbell County Courthouse. At one time this section of Fulton County was actually Campbell County. It merged with Fulton County in 1932. Luckily the citizens of Fairburn have preserved their old courthouse.

This is the front of the courthouse:



This is a shot from the back:



This picture is taken from the front steps of the courthouse looking towards the railroad tracks. That distance is about the same as my front porch was from the tracks.



As I walked the front lawn of the courthouse and snapped these pictures the train you see was moving back and forth as it was changing cars out somewhere up the track. You can’t have lived next to the tracks for all those years and not know what those sounds are….the clinks and clanks as the cars pulled forward, the growl of the engines revving up, and then the engines powering down for the change in direction followed by the engines revving up again and more clinks and clanks.



As I walked down to the end of the lawn I thought to myself, “How many times have you heard that sound during the day or even more eerily in the middle of the night?” Thousands, I guessed. With the sound effects in the background I snapped this picture of the Georgia Historical Marker. There is a better online picture of it here.



As I got back into my vehicle I decided to head up Roosevelt Highway towards Red Oak, the little hamlet that I actually lived in. My next step will be the school I attended from first through seventh grade. Stay turned…..

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Scavenging For My Past, Part 1

One of the things I find myself doing as I teach is I tell my students tidbits about my past including family history. As we discuss colonization, the Indian Removal Act, or the Civil War I tell students extra bits of information I know about the topic or I share a real family connection I have to the event.

I believe it is extremely important for any social studies teacher who discusses history with students to help them connect to what they are studying either through personal connections they can discover on their own or through vicarious connections I can provide for them. I find that these connections maintain interest and motivation which in turn increases retention of the content.

My personal connections are very important to me. As a young girl I spent many hours sitting and talking with my maternal grandfather as well as my father’s father and his second wife. She was a lovely, gentle person had known both sides of my family for many years. She was a treasure trove of lore. My mother is a natural born story-teller and used to keep my sister and I enthralled as she told stories about her childhood. My father, after he retired began researching his family roots and quite frankly I need to spend several days with him to allow him to pass all of his family knowledge to me before we both forget who all those serious looking frontier folk are in the old brown photographs. I also benefited from stories told by my great-grandmother (I wrote about my sticky situation during her funeral here) and, I am deluged with assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins who love their family stories as much as I do. Quite simply…we share, sometimes a little too much.

Daughter Dear will be gone all week on a church trip. Since Mom’s Taxi Service will be on hiatus all week I have decided to whittle away at my “Gee, if I ever have the time I’d like to…” list. I’m going exploring. I’m going to visit my past. Come along this week as I do some visiting, looking, exploring, and re-live some good memories and some bad. I’m off to remember connections I already have and to make some new ones to share with my students.

I grew up in the middle of a lumberyard that my dad managed. The house I lived in was a Craftsman type house that was not original to the property. Folks had told my mom that the house had been built in 1929 and had sat in a different spot on the property. When the showroom for the lumberyard was built the house had been moved to a spot next to the store. A parking lot separated my house from my dad’s business. Early on after moving into the house we located a baby’s handprint and footprint on a cement ledge along with the date 1929.

My house was a wonderful box-type house with the rooms all connecting to one another----there were no hallways at all. There were lovely, solid wood French doors that opened up from the living room into my parent’s bedroom and another set that opened up into what was the dining room-----we used it as a family room. The floors were solid pine and we had some lovely fireplaces in three rooms, but they had long since been plugged up for some reason. We managed, I don’t know how, with one bathroom between four people. My dad suffered for many years with a house full of girls. There was one large vent for our floor furnace so that meant we were cold in the winter and hot in the summer until we put in window air conditioning units.

We moved into my house when I was five. The summer after my freshman year of college my dad announced his retirement and he and mom moved to his ancestral property in Canton, Georgia. I left the only home I had every really known.

It was shortly after our move that we heard on the news late one night that the lumberyard was on fire. Mother’s worst fear the entire time we had lived there had finally come true. Think about a Home Depot catching on fire with all of the chemicals and propellants, the lumber and the lumber, and the lumber. Get the idea? It was a ferocious fire and a big news story with helicopters, live updates, and rumors that it had been set. Friends in the area later told us all about it. Interstate 285 borders the property on the far side and the fire was so intense they had to stop traffic on the expressway.

Amazingly we heard my house had survived. The showroom and warehouse was a complete loss and was bulldozed, loaded onto dump trucks, and carried away. The company dad had worked for sold the property. A few years ago when I was wishing I could see my house again a family friend told me the house had not been destroyed, but had been moved. I was overjoyed. She told me the house had been moved down the road and had been placed on a lot down Rivertown Road in Fairburn, Georgia.

I still travel through that area quite often and occasionally I creep down Rivertown Road to see if I can locate my house. I’ve even enlisted my children at various times to help. They’ve only seen the house in photos so I don’t know what good they could really do me, but they try.

I’m determined to find out what happened to my house. Is it still tangible----something I can touch, see, and smell, or is it gone forever only to live in my memories?

I’m going to spend the coming week exploring my past, facing it headlong by walking over it and through it, and I invite you, dear reader, to journey with me.

See part two here.

Remember that you can subscribe to this blog and receive my updated posts by email when you submit your address in the Feed Blitz box at the top of this page or if you read several blogs you can click on the Bloglines button to the right. Thanks in advance for your comments!