Todays post is the last stop on my St. Louis home tour. This is the last home I lived in in here. It is not a grand home, but it really was lovely, with a fantastic interior, and a massive backyard. I have memories of this home in all seasons, blazing summers, balmy falls and winters buried under several feet of snow. This house resonates very strongly for me as it was the home I lived in from kinder to fourth grade. The exact ages my daughters are now. As a result, I see everything through their eyes, and think a lot about where I was at their age. In the last couple of posts I have mentioned a lot about how things were not always iddilyic growing up, and in this home, the unraveling, for the most part, was in free fall, but this home will also, always hold very special memories for me. I'll never forget the summer that my God-brother Kevin came to visit. Kevin was the youngest son of my Godmother Frances, (Aunt Fran). I know that the term Godmother may not mean as much to some folks now as it used to, but for me and my family, my Godmother Frances (Frankie) was my mother's best friend in the world, and truly a second mother to me. As a result, I grew up with her kids as my own siblings, my WAY cooler older siblings. How's this for cool; when they were all teenagers, they went to live in Africa with my Aunt Fran and Uncle Bob, who were respectively working as anthropologists and photo journalists there. When my God-brother Kevin came to visit one summer, He was also practicing to be a professional ice skater in Lake Placid, triple cool. Best memory of that summer, Kevin crashing my big wheel through the faux wood paneling in our finished basement! Sometimes being a kid, you just need to hold on to the fun memories as much as the hard ones. After much restropspection this week I leave you with this famous quote ("you can't go home again") from Thomas C. Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel" I think it says it all:
"He saw now that you can't go home again--not ever. There was no road back. Ended for him, with the sharp and clean finality of the closing of a door, was the time of his dark roots, like those of a pot-bound plant, could not be left to feed upon their own substance and nourish their own little self-absorbed designs. Henceforth, they must be spread outward--away from the hidden, secret, and unfathomed past that holds man's spirit prisoner--outward, outward toward the rich and life-giving soil of a new freedom in the wide world of all humanity. And there came to him a vision of man's true home, beyond the ominous and cloud-engulfed horizon of the here and now, in the green and hopeful and still-virgin meadows of the future. "
Here's to the virgin meadows of the future, and a few pictures from that time for fun. xoxo
