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A trip down Memory Lane


F_in Ray Of Sunshine

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Wow!  Lots of stuff revisited!

When I was a kid, my mother would ship me to her sister's house outside of Wilkes-Barre, PA, which my grandfather built, where my mother was born and raised and my grandparents lived until they passed away.  I played, along with my cousins, in the Breslau-Linnwood and Iona Little Leagues, etc. It is about 1/4 mile from the Susquehanna River and we had lots of fun playing along it.

Today, all my dozens of cousins live on the other side of the river, but when I visit them I sometimes take the longer drive through town so I can see that house - which looks basically the same as it has through the decades as the two pictures below show:

Here's the house now in 2020 according to Google Maps street-level view - my grandfather also built the mall house straight back:

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Here's my mother in 1937, age 15 on the right, with three of her sisters standing almost in front of the window on the side of the house closest to the street in the picture above. My mother's 19 year-old sister Sally, with her hand on my mother's shoulder, is the one who died of COVID-19 in April. She was my last aunt or uncle and would have been 100 on Aug 1:

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Here, a few blocks north along 1st Street from my aunt's old house, is the baseball field where I played and the river and island beyond it where cousins and I spent a lot of time. I stop briefly by these places and reminisce - then reminisce more with my cousins, the older ones who played along the river with me, when I drive across the Carey Ave. Bridge and visit their homes a few miles to the north.

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1 hour ago, Airehead said:

What a beautiful chapter in your biography. 

But it was only a couple of weeks each summer - and then only until my mother and grandmother (Dad’s mother) had a blowout and we never went back.

Other than that, apart from a couple of years in my early twenties, none of it is worth revisiting.

But I had my bike, my books and my skates, so it worked out.

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15 minutes ago, F_in Ray Of Sunshine said:

My cousins were also shipped there (FedEx, I think).

Mine were dumped off by their parents.  They only lived in the next county over.

We had an elderly neighbor who had a couple grandkids from Pittsburgh.  They came for a couple weeks every summer.  They were true suburban kids who really wanted to get every minute out of their 2 weeks - shooting frogs in the pond, sleeping under the stars, building tree houses, stomping through streams building forts in the woods - endless fun with them.

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15 minutes ago, Kzoo said:

Mine were dumped off by their parents.  They only lived in the next county over.

That’d be my sister and I. We used to live in NJ and I half-ass remember spending summers up there then, but we moved here (an hour away from grandparents) when I was seven. We spent a few more summers there after we moved here. Pretty sure my mother was just happy to be rid of us.

The cousins came up from NJ and it was about the only time we saw them all year. Didn’t particularly hit it off with any of them, so it wasn’t too different from being home, in that respect.

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Fum memories!  It reminds me of my summers in the Catskills at my Grandma's house, including playing in the stream and the combined post office/general store. .  It's nice to have these memories even if it was a limited period of time.

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