Last week, my son and my 9½ year old granddaughter went off to Illinois for my mom's 85th birthday. We were joined by my brother and sister and their spouses. It was a lot of fun.

One of the best parts was when we took Mom off to Glendale Heights, IL to see the Veterans Memorial Park on the land that was once our home in the 1950s.

In short, Mom was stunned at the changes, but also so impressed at what that little parcel had become. It could have turned out so much worse.

So, of course, we had to pose at "Big Rock":

(That's my son, Marcus, me, and little brother, Greg, standing on the rock, in the back, and granddaughter Zara, Mom and little sister, Penny, in front)

We also took a picture of us three siblings and Mom by the fountain plaza of the park, just about where our house stood, and by the Marine memorial stone, since Dad was in the Marines in WW II:

Mom turned 85 that day, June 11. Dad would have liked our timing.

Yes, he would.

Really, a good bit of the time, I have to remind myself that I am no longer twenty.

Then my right shoulder, the one I dislocated at age 48, and my right knee, the one with the torn cartilage and subsequent surgery at age 50, kicks in to remind me.

OTOH, I can still walk the legs off my thirty year old son any day.

Really, it's quite likely genetic. Three of my four grandparents lived into their mid-eighties, having done just about everything wrong in terms of diet and exercise. One great aunt, my maternal grandmother's sister made it 99 with her mind still sharp as a tack up to the end.

In mid June, my mom turns 85. She lives by herself, rents out half of her duplex, drives herself every where, does volunteer work at her church, is active in her legal secretaries organization and is still very active in her hiking club, despite having total knee replacement surgery four years ago. Yeah, this is a woman who took judo lessons as a twenty year old, working as a secretary in a munitions plant during WW II, climbed a waterfall in the Bahamas in her late seventies, went kayaking in Alaska and then hiked 3,000 feet up a mountain trail there at 80 and, two years ago went off to Greece with my sister and niece, climbing up to the top of the Acropolis in Athens, even with that artificial knee:

Truth be told, I plan to live to 100. I would not be surprised to have Mom still with me then.

Earlier this month, my family took a journey.

My ex, with whom I am still friends (hey, she is still the mother our children) needed to go to a two day business seminar this week, for her other job and labor of love, in a suburb of Chicago. Since she had to leave after a full day of her main job, she was not looking forward to driving from West Des Moines to Naperville, IL by herself, so we made it a family project. I and our now adult (for the most part) children would share the driving tasks to take her there and then drive up an hour or so to Rockford, IL to spend that time with my 84 year old mom. Oh, and travelling along with us were my new son-in-law and our darling, soon to be nine year old granddaughter.

Really, it worked out pretty well.

However, we had planned for an extra. After we picked up Mom/Grandma Sara in Naperville, we were going to make a little side trip to where I, Dad/Grandpa Aulus, lived just north of Wheaton, IL on Bloomingdale Road in what is now Glendale Heights but was fifty years ago, just any old rural Illinois and us on a nice five acres plot.

I had been back there in the mid Seventies, before our children were born and before the house was torn down. I was there again in the mid Eighties, now with my kids and just after the house I lived in for most of the first ten years of my life had been torn down. We found the foundations of our chicken coop and our garage then and snapped a few photos on that occasion.

Arriving there, it looked like all of my childhood memories gone.

As much as I realised I had to accept that things change, as I got to our old acreage and looked about, I just wanted to sit down and cry.

Then I saw something. I got closer and I suddenly felt a lot better.

So, what was it?

First, here's a bird's eye view of our old acreage, now the Veterans Memorial Park in Glendale Heights, IL at the corner of Bloomingdale Road and E. Fullerton Avenue, right here.

The circular structure is right about where our house stood. In fact one of the village administrators told me in an email last week that their contractor did run into an old house foundation when he was building the circular structure. The sidewalk running between it and E. Fullerton Avenue is about where our driveway was.

Now, looking up to the upper left corner of the picture in the above URL, is a line of trees. By one of them was that thing that gladened my heart. This:

It was actually at the back of our next door neighbor's yard, in a grove of small trees. My brother and I liked to hang out there and dream up stuff. To us, this medium sized hunk of granite was "Big Rock" (well it was big to a seven year old and a four year old!) and it is still there, almost fifty years after we left. That kinda made me feel good. So, my kids, son-in-law and granddaughter posed with Dad/Grandpa, who was now feeling a lot better:

So, I wandered through the park, and looked around. It's a nice place, peaceful and quiet, despite now being on the corner of a busy intersection and a big water park in what was, in my time, nothing but a corn field:

It's a nice place to wander about and remember a time when two little boys once watched their dad mow the lawn,

and a big brother got to be Davey Crockett to his brother and sister as Indians,

and the best Cub Scout Den ever, got to hang out and do stuff:

(just after the old henhouse, in the background, had been torn down)

So, maybe you can go home again, as home isn't so much a place, but memories, friends and family.