traveling to Fox Lake II - the follow up

Late in the 1960's they paved The Crooked Road,....it went straight from a wide gravel road to a 4 lane concrete roadway, from Rand Road to Highway 68 (Dundee Road),.... not long after they also paved the rest of the route from Dundee up to Highway 83.... Father lived to see that.  It made us sad. No more Crooked Road.  I believe it was in the early 1980's that they put in the partial "s" curve, eliminating the need to make a left turn onto busy Dundee, and a block later turn right.

Father died, but most of you would know that.  He had the lake house for sale for several years before his death. Mother sold the lake house the year after father died. The kind lady who owned it with her brother did allow me to go inside on those very rare occasions that I was at the lake as a teenager.  In that way I can follow up for you on what happened to "the house at Fox Lake".

In the 1970's the lake house began to be transformed.  The new owners had a large deck installed on the front of the house --that being the side facing the lake.  The deck covered approximately half of the grass yard in front of the house, and was as wide as the house itself.  Father would never have done that to that yard.

The old, small, garage simply collapsed. A large, 2 -1/2 car garage was built on the property, following newer "setback" zoning rules, it was more than 30 feet from Drexel Boulevard.  This makes it unrecognizable to nearly everyone, except for me and a couple of people who lived in nearby homes, and stayed there long after we left.

Also in the 1970's the dining room inside the house was made into a beautiful, modern kitchen.  They installed a laundry room, where there had been one in the past, before my time,....  at some point they removed the concrete sidewalk addition that bore my tiny hand and foot prints.  The rock garden that Father was so proud of fell into disrepair,... no one weeded it or took care of it at all, and it gradually turned into a small mound of earth, no longer discernible as the rock garden/goldfish pond it once was.

In the early 1990's we visited the house at Fox Lake for a final time.  We arrived to the news that the kind woman who remember me had been laid to rest, just a few days prior to our visit.  But the brother said that he knew who I was, and he allowed us to come inside, look around and sit reminiscing for a little while.  As we wandered through the house it was quickly apparent to me that the house so many of us remembered was gone. 

They straightened the staircase to upstairs, which had had a little turn at the top.  That was where I stopped,... I climbed those now unfamiliar stairs, just to see the top, but then I descended again..... I was near tears. I managed to steady my voice just enough to tell the kind man 'thank you' and 'we won't be returning again'.

That was 1993,... late summer or early fall.....

in the years since I have driven down Drexel Boulevard a time or two,... just to know that I could still find the house, never stopping, 
but following onto Michigan Avenue, Lakeside and Ackerman -returning out to Grass Lake Road.



it is true, what they say.... you cannot go home again....
but I knew that.

You see, the home of my childhood,... the greenhouse, was gone,..we saw it demolished when I was still a child. I regret that father showed me the home of my childhood, with a bulldozer in the middle of where the kitchen had been.

I can never go home again, because that is a place that no longer exists.


And that is life,.... what you dream of as "home" .... it's gone.
You cannot recapture what once was, because it is no longer.