Possumblog

Home at last!

1. Hah! Dr Weevil and I are Navy brats. I think we moved at least every 2 years on average. The VA Tidewater area is closest to being a hometown for me. Don't miss much, the summers were even worse than here in Baltimore.

2. For Navy people, my parents didn't buy and sell a lot of houses, 4 that I remember, 2 in Norfolk, 1 in Va Beach, and 1 in Baltimore. Sadly enough, last time I looked for the one in Va Beach, I couldn't find the development (I know it's still there, just brain damage making itself evident). The neighborhoods are all still OK. My parents have moved into senior housing, so don't actually own a place now.

3. Nice thing about the Catonsville suburb of Baltimore is that it hasn't changed much in the 23 years we've lived in our house.

I'm up.

I'll play.

you would think i would have better answers since i had longer to think abou them-- well you would be wrong. I do have longer answers but they need a cold beer or three
1. It’s strange to think about Bessemer as my “hometown” as I’ve lived away from there since college—over half my life. I guess I most miss old friends but they moved away also. I also miss the Alabama BBQ.
2. When my mother died we sold the house to a friend of the family. The last time I saw it he had cleaned and fixed it up and it looked fine. Sort of took me back to old times.
3. The growth and traffic and crime in Greenville in the last few years have been amazing. We are the hub of a rural area so we get the growth and the drugs and such. I used to say there was no place to do in town at 3 am but no place where you couldn’t go. Now both of those are false.

No, I don't. I miss some things about Dallas -- good Mexican food, Indian food, the art museum.

I haven't been back to the neighborhood that I first grew up in for many years. We moved when I was 12 to the house my sister sold after my mother died. That neighborhood is now mainly Hispanic, but continues to be working class.

We currently live in the house Lyman's parents built when they moved here from Columbia, LA in 1962. The Riverfront development is new and pleasing, but traffic on the main street, Hwy 84, is getting worse by the day.

1. Nope. Left it for college with no intentions of returning. Nearly kept that promise. Left for good 20+ years ago.

2. No, but they do still own some of the property across the road from it.

3. The biggest change in where I live will occur when my daughter heads out to college in the fall. Things are going to get so quiet.

1. No, I've moved many many times. I miss non-stop seeing/hearing about da Bears, pizza, Italian Beefs and the general Chicago "vibe". I don't miss it enough to move back, as it's way too crowded for my tastes now. Seems like the main roads are one extended strip mall interrupted by highway interchanges.

2. No, we moved twice from early grade school to when I graduated. The house is about the same except the price increased by 10x in 40 years.

3. Not much except the WalMart moving and it's now a Super WalMart. We got a few more restaurants, but things are holding back as long as this area is dry (and I don't mean rain). That's fine by me.

I'm in too.

Me too!

1. Do you still live in the town where you grew up? If not, what do you miss the most? If so, what has changed the most?

I'm three suburbs away from Essendon. I was going to say I miss the rumble of trams along Keilor Road, but now I hear the rumble of trams along Sydney Road. I miss the sound of 1950s and 1960s aircraft engines warming up in the Ansett Engine Maintenance plant based in a corrugated iron 1940s hangar at the top of the street, just south of Essendon airport. I miss the Lockheed Electras, Vickers Viscounts, Fokker Friedships and Douglas DC-6Bs flying in from all over Australia; but they stopped years ago, of course. Even Ansett isn't there any more.

2. Does your family still own the house you grew up in? Either way, what was it like the last time you saw it?

Yes. Mother holds the fort. We visited a couple of weeks ago. The smell of vegetable soup greets you about a suburb away. The kitchen lino is as clean and polished as the day it was laid in 1959. The western view of the sunset has been built out. The neighbours have mostly gone except for several old dears up the street. Many houses have fallen to developers building multi-unit or mock-Georgian monstrosities. Nevertheless, it is home.

3. What is the biggest change in the last 5 years where you live now?

The accepted definition of inner suburbs has moved outwards some ten kilometres, creeping through Brunswick into Coburg and now beyond. The elderly are being supplanted by young professionals. The train station, formerly almost empty, is now packed with commuters from eight to nine in the morning.

Speaking of trams, there's one thing that's been constant no matter where I've lived--the sound of freight trains. It's pretty hard to live anywhere in this county out of earshot of a railroad. We've got one at the foot of the hill from our house, maybe a quarter-mile away. When a fast freight comes through, it sounds like it's in the back yard. If I lived hard on the tracks it might be bothersome, but I kinda like it.

Background noise here is barge traffic on the river. When the river is high they sound as though they're passing through the back yard. The big tugs shiver the windows sometimes.

We'll lose a lot of that when we replace the windows.

I bet you'll still feel it--anything that can rattle the windows probably makes the walls quiver a bit, too.