The Old Homestead

Today I took Willow on a trip through time. We visited the house I grew up in, my elementary school, my junior high school, and my high school. I hadn't been by my parents' house in several years. After my mom died and we'd rescued everything we thought needed rescuing (space allowing - both Greg and I lived in apartments, and as it was, we had to rent a storage space which we promptly filled to the brim), my dad sold the house for $600,000.00. The realtor bought it himself, saying that he was going to live in it with his family. Out of curiosity, my cousin Peter recently looked up the house online and discovered that it had been sold again, to the tune of $1.5 million or so. Sure, a lot of work had been done on it between sales, but still... that's quite a mark-up!

Here's the house as it looked in the late sixties, shortly after my mom and dad bought it. I still fondly remember the Volkswagen in the driveway because coins would always end up getting stuck between and under the seats, so it was like a goldmine for me. Once, I even found a copy of Playboy (or some similar magazine) in the back somewhere. Eventually, we had two Volkswagens, this one and a newer, yellow one. The newer one wasn't as fun. Maybe this is where I developed my appreciation for decrepit machinery.

I had a lot of toy Volkswagens too. I can still recall pitching a major fit one day when my mom brought me home a Volkswagen that I already had. She said something like, "but the new one works better!", to which I replied, "no it doesn't" as I furiously demonstrated that this was so. What an ungrateful little jerk I was.

Another memorable moment in Volkswagen fandom came when it was revealed that there was a really old Volkswagen at the rear of a garage where my dad was getting some work done on one of our cars. He had probably mentioned to the mechanic (or the owner) that I liked Volkswagens, so we were taken back into a dark corner of the garage to gaze in wonder upon a Volkswagen so old that the rear window was divided in half. Here's a photo I found after a quick online image search:

And here's the same house today (literally - we just got back from our little photo tour).

This is very much in keeping with the trend of places looking nicer now than they did when I lived in them.