No place like home

I actually started this post with a whole different topic in mind, it didn't quite work out as planned. Anyway...

I grew up in a small farm town in South Jersey. My family has lived there for generations, and my whole "block" was made up of blood relatives. The Middle school separates my uncle from the other houses, it's baseball fields back up to my parent's property (which was WAY convenient when I was running late and missed the bus! ie: every day) That property used to belong to my great-grandparents, they sold it to the school board, if that gives you any idea of how long we'd been there. I recently asked my Grandmom about the generations I don't remember, and things I never knew. I'm really lucky to have grown up with my extended family around, one of my cousins is 10 months younger than me, and like a brother. We shared a playpen many times, and my Aunt joked I was her "oldest", she had 5 kids instead of 4. I asked Grandmom how we came from Mt. Holly, NJ, where my great-grandmother grew up, to Tabernacle, and the story she told cracked me up. My great-grandparents got married, and my great-grandfather was living with an aunt and uncle in Tabernacle. This was back in the mid to late '30s, and apparently they did things a lot different. He brought his bride home with him, and his aunt, upon hearing a female voice in the house, confronted him. He told her "It's ok, I got married!" and that was that. There was one problem though. They didn't have indoor plumbing in the house, they had an outhouse. My great-grandmom told him "Ill only move there if you put a bathroom in" (she was accustomed to city life, this was totally unacceptable to her) and she gave him 3 weeks to do it. Well, I knew this woman, she had a big hand in raising me, until she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's when I was 15. This is totally her, I can just picture her handing down that ultimatum. He did put that bathroom in, and she stayed, and got pregnant with my grandmom. This wasn't the house where I knew them to live, but was across the street. After Grandmom was born, my great-grandmom wanted to move out, because the aunt had dementia, and great-grandmom was worried she would harm the baby. They bought the old house across the street, and spent forever remodeling it. We talked about WWII, and how my great-grandfather was drafted when Grandmom was a baby. She told me about my great-grandmother working in the factories while he was at war, all of the things you read in history books about the depression, but it becomes real when it's your family's history. I asked how our family acquired all the land we have now, which is now her sister's house, the store, and the properties my mom, uncle, and their 2 cousins all built houses on. A TON of land, plus the Middle school property. A lot of the land was given to repay a debt to my great-grandparents, though I don't know what for. The rest was bought, because the owner died, and my great-grandfather disliked the people who wanted to buy it. The man who liked everyone? Seriously, this man was known for being friendly, he loved to talk to people. She told me how the general store came to be, turns out the building attached to the house had been a store years before, and she was bored one day in the late 1950s, so she re-opened it. My uncle now runs it, has since I was a baby, and it was all on a whim. I listened to her tell me about the Grovatts, the Hillman's, the Parks' and all the other families in the town, she grew up with a generation, my mom grew up with the next, me the generation after that. It's really amazing to look at a small town like that, and the degrees of separation involved in so many decades. She would point out the ties from us to one family, or another, and how the people she knew related to the ones I grew up with. My uncle was mayor for about 10 years, and in a town that small everyone knows everything. Politics put us under a microscope even more than normal. The rumors you'd hear during campaigns were horrible and hilarious at the same time. Privacy was non-existent in my childhood, because there was always someone that would say "You're Tina's little girl!", and though you didn't know them, they obviously knew your mother. Honestly, for all of that, I still miss it a lot, and would go back in a heartbeat if I could. What was my point? Oh, yeah... bloom where you are planted, but always know where your roots are.