My Grandfathers House

[mudslinger]

For Decades I watched my Grandfather take care of his home. His grass was like a golf course green, well manicured . His flowers always well taken care of , thinned out where required and fertilized to increase the vibrant colors. You would never find a chipped piece of paint on his house or weeds in between the side walk cracks. His trees were all well kept with no suckers growing around the base, his home was his pride. My Grandfather is dead now, Died about twenty years ago. My Grandmother sold the house and moved into a Senior Center. I drove by my Grandfather's house the other day when I was in the city. The Windows were all boarded up, you could hardly see the  house from all the wild growth covering it. The Paint was all but peeled off and brick on the front porch falling apart. The only thing left on the lot that made me realize he had once lived in this delapitated house was a single rose pushing itself through the thick weed patch on the south side of the house. I recognised it because it was one of his favorites. The people who had lived in this house since he died, destroyed it to the level of condemnation. What sort of people are these goons that now occupy our cities.

[Griobhtha]

What was once nice neighborhoods change.  the area becomes "unpopular " and then they are left or become rentals .  Some take care of their property and some don't.  We have on man one our street that has 3 ft high weeds for a yard.  This is in a custom built homes on the river and before the housing crash , were rather expensive.  he inherited the property and just doesn't care.  drive around and unless there is a homeowners association, you will find trashy houses in most neighborhoods.  I know it hurts because it was your family home, so the only thing you can do is buy it and fix it up again.

[mudslinger]

Can't do that, you would be dead in days living in that neighborhood.

[takncarabizniz]

As I posted a little while back, sometimes you can't go home again...
 
I was back in my hometown just recently, first time in 5 years and my family home is completely gone.  It was condemned after my mother took ill and we had to put her in a nursing home...all her children put together couldn't afford to keep it up anymore...we took care of it as long as we could, but it was 75 years old at the time, had been added on to and remodeled several times, but we were a poor family and never had been able to ever completely redo it the way Mom wanted and after she left, trying to get things like the roof fixed, or keep the kids from breaking out windows, became an overwhelming task since most of us lived so far away.  All the neighbors were at least as old as she was, it was a lovely old neighborhood...so in her final year, we donated the property to Habitat for Humanity and struck a deal with the city for its demolition...
 
Then the local high school used the property for its building trades classes and a new, small home was built on the old homesite...
 
But it's not the same...huge lot with this little house sitting at the front of it...no back yard, (our house had always sat at the back of the lot and we had huge front yard areas, one side completely set up as a city farm which we lovingly (though often begrudgingly as kids), took care of and my mother proudly tended over as a main source for our food and her incredible bartering skills to get other things we needed.  All her glorious lilacs gone, I dug up a mess of runners before it was torn down, and managed to get one small runner to grow in my yard and it's now about 5 feet tall...Only 3 trees left on the property, 2 elms and one maple...all of which look sad, knotted and tangled, nothing like the huge trees she had, that we all climbed (and some of us often fell out of, giving her more pause as she tended broken arms, twisted ankles and bloody knuckles and noses)...she grew hollyhocks that must have stood 6 foot tall, and every fall we would pull off the dried seed pods, putting each kind in baggies with color labels, that she would trade for other seeds in the spring, all gone...
Even our old fence, that we used as part of an obstacle course, seeing who could jump it, flinging ourselves in cartwheels over the horizontal slats or running along the top rail (Gawd we were good), until such time as one of us would fall off, breaking an arm (I had a brother who managed that 3 times), gone and replaced with a chain link.  My mother used to threaten to sell us to the circus because we were such daredevil acrobats.  We never really told her about all the times we would climb up on the house, all the way to the highest peak and lob GI Joes and Barbies off the top in spectacular demonstrations of their high dive skills, watching them land below in our sandbox, in which, we would dig out furrows, line with plastic bags and fill with water for Action figure Olympic competition...LOL
 
I took pictures the first time I had gone back, after the demolition...when there was nothing but a slash pile of tree branches, fencing and busted up foundation, that was used to fill in the old basement...I sat in the dirt and cried.  When I went back this time, took pictures of the new house there, the trees, the address marker on the small front porch, I cried again...with all that we went through growing up, we had always had home, and Mom and quiet, little comfort spots where we could hide, or play...but it's all gone...
 
Things in our lives change...not often for the better in our minds...I don't see that the house (which unfortunately has been on the market 3 times since it was built), is a new home for someone else...I just see what I lost... and I think sometimes, I am being unfair, but all the memories I have, good and bad, were there for a reason, whether it was to make me stronger, or make me think about how lucky I am to have what I have worked for today...
 
I actually miss my home, it was all I knew, it was the only home my parents ever had and raised all their children in and even helped to raise a couple granddaughters in for a while...but those who come after will never know its history, never hear the giggles and the shouts of the neighborhood kids at play in the yard or chasing up and down the tree lined street...it truly never is the same...so we move on.
 
IMO, there is not as much a sense of pride as we had in generations past.  We now live in a disposble society...something breaks?  Get a new one...don't feel like taking care of something, move on...it's frustrating and sad...too many people like the easy way out of everything and that is why a lot of our country suffers from delapidation, crime and indifference...
 
Sad...
 
Sorry, I just realized that I have gone on seemingly endlessly...but I don't want to erase it, they are my thoughts and feelings...

[sunshine]

Yep...once you sell your house...it goes downhill fast. I won a national lawn contest with my last  house... it was on tv, newspaper,  magazines etc....it has had new owners 3 times now in the last 9 years. It kills me to drive by it....it's all over grown, pure weeds, un edged, my arbor was torn down....ughhhhhhh

[emilyB]

It's sad as you always hope that something you have loved, tendered and preserved will be passed on into similar hands and I think it rarely does.  Maybe that is where the saying "you can't go home again" comes from.
 
We worked for 10 years renovating an old farmhouse on the coast and made the mistake of restoring the natural wild jungle into tiered gardens of colorful plants.  It was lovely.  We ended putting so much money into it and it was so much maintenance that we decided to sell and make a small fortune out of it.  The elements at the coast are so harsh anyway and the people who bought it were transferred to the east coast and it quickly went back to it's original state.  It really wasn't a mistake as we profited out of it and I will never regret the 10 years of hard work.  Just wished it could have stayed exactly as we had left it.
 
 

[Griobhtha]

My home was house on the Naval base, ascross from the park.  we could walk across the street, and roller skate on the huge cement slab, laid for just that.  Swing, climb on the monkey bars.  As I got older the base was our playground for "Ditchem" and we would play until curfew in the summer.  They torn down all that base housing and that made me sad, but then , we never owned it.