Memories

When I told my mom that I was going to Fayetteville last weekend to visit my friend Lisa, she reminded me that I grew up about 30 miles from there, in Southern Pines.  I hadn't realized that Southern Pines was so close to Fayetteville, and I decided that it would be worth the trip over to visit my old house.  Lisa and I started out on Saturday afternoon kind of haphazardly following directions we pieced together from her roommate and a couple of gas station attendants.  We had been driving for about 45 minutes, when all of the sudden I knew we were close.  I sensed something, I didn't know what it was, but I could just feel it.  Sure enough, the next turn took me to a neighbor's house that I remembered so clearly, and it still stood there as if nothing had changed.  My house, however, had changed.  The new occupants had painted it light blue, and they had done a much poorer job landscaping it, keeping it up than my Dad had.  It didn't look familiar at all.  The field that separated my old house from the neighbor's  (where my Dad's jeep went careening after it pulled a stump from our yard, while my Dad wasn't in it, he had forgotten to take it out of gear) now had a house on it.  I am glad that house wasn't there then, my Dad barely managed to jump back into the Jeep before it hit the house across the field!  I went down to the lake where my brother almost drowned, where I got pulled from my bike by a german shepard, where I got shot with a BB gun, where I used to shoot at dragonflies with a BB gun.  That lake hadn't changed at all.  I was amazed.  It really had a rejuvenating effect looking out at it, I felt like a kid again.  The woods near it now had a house there as well, and I remembered that was where my younger brother had hit me in the back of the head with a golf ball from about 50 yards.  The one thing I wish I had remembered to look at was JB Thompson's old house.  I rode down his driveway at what seemed like 100 miles an hour to jump a ramp, and promptly broke my collar bone.  My friends came rushing over, not because they were worried about me, but to rip a mini pac-man machine out of my backpack and rush up the hill to see if it was still working.  When I finally stood up, my left arm was now hanging down to my knee!  Anyway, I wish I had looked for his house, just to see that driveway again.  In my mind, it is almost straight down, and I would be curious to see if my recollection was accurate.  Good times, Good times.  It's funny but when many of these things happened I couldn't have been angrier, but those memories have now become the good ones...  and on the way out we passed by the place where someone had thrown my lunchbox out the window of the school bus.  It was great to see the old area again.

Comments

[Weeeeee!]

I went back to see my Granny's old farmhouse a couple of years back only to find it bulldozed. My grandfather helped his father build that house from scratch, so needless to say, I was devistated to see it gone. Glad your trip down memory lane wasn't as upsetting.

[Nic]

Hey James, I would love to see some pics of your old house.

[Nic]

Hey James, I would love to see some pics of your old house.