Growing up in one neighborhood, from birth through high school graduation, is a privilege my parents did not have. My father’s father worked for a large construction company, building levees and canals all over the coast and the southwestern United States. He moved his family with the work, so my father and his siblings had to go, too, attending many different schools in the process, never putting down deep roots. My mother’s parents lived in a much more rural area and only moved a couple of times, but did not live in a traditional neighborhood, per se.
Before I was born, my parents bought a house in Fort Worth, in the Mistletoe Heights neighborhood. That house was my home from birth until I was about 8 years old. My paternal grandparents bought a house on the next block of the same street, and I would stay there after school many days. My parents then built a new house in the vacant lot across the street from our first house. We lived there until I graduated from high school. Then, they moved about 3 blocks north, but soon moved back to the old street, next door to their original house in the neighborhood (and back across the street from the one they had built). Yes, three houses on the same block!
This past year, I revisited the old neighborhood a couple of times. Once to meet a lady whose grandmother was the original owner of the first house we lived in on the street. This was truly fascinating, as we walked through the home and discussed what had changed and what we both remembered (though many years apart). The current owners have “only” been there about 32 years! It was fun to walk through (though I’ve been there many times since we moved) and remember the red carpet that covered the wood floors in the front living room, and the old-school “intercom” tube that went from outside the front door, down the hallway inside the walls, and into the back of the house (basically, a pipe you could talk through when you didn’t want to go to the front door!). I remembered my “sticker door” that was painted white before my mom wisely took it (and all the other interior doors) to be stripped, exposing the original wood grain. Of course, the granddaughter of the original owner had some interesting perspectives on the neighborhood from many years before my family moved in. She came home to eat lunch (fried pork chops!) from Lilly B. Clayton, the neighborhood elementary school (off-campus lunch in grade school!). There were no fences between the houses then, and, very uniquely, her grandmother and her great-aunt lived next to each other in similarly designed, but very different, homes.
There, in the stairwell to the basement of our first house in Mistletoe, I spotted an old AC filter housing with my father’s name on it, written in Sharpie. It’s been there for over 32 years, when, for whatever reason, he wrote his own name on it. I went back a few days later to celebrate the 75th birthday of one of the neighbors. They have been on the street since before I was born and insist they will be carted out before moving away. I appreciate and admire that, because they are always there; they are steady and stable when so much in life is not. You can’t go home again, but you can go to the old neighborhood again. People will sell and move and pass on, but it’s nice to visit when you can; to see the trees you planted, the yards you mowed, and the people you love still there.
– Shelby Kimball
