Today we took husband’s Aunt out to eat.  It’s her 92 birthday!  She looks amazing for 92, and acts much younger.  She says she feels like she’s still in her 60’s, and it’s just her body that is slowing her down now.  I want to be like  her when I’m 92!

After dinner we went for a ride,  she likes to “get out and see the country” as she says.  It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the blue sky, some of the trees are turning.  We drove by her sister’s old home, and then we just headed west, ending up in Howell, where I grew up.  I haven’t been past the house in many years.  I have declined to go there because I wanted to remember it the way we knew it, with the woods and stream intact nearby rather than filled with the subdivision I’ve heard is there now.  So I wasn’t too happy when we arrived in Howell and husband wanted to drive by to show his aunt where I grew up.

Surprisingly it was OK.  I didn’t stare at the subdivision in the woods, but did at the house that Dad built for us in the 60’s.  I really didn’t have enough time to look at everything, but the impression I got was that the front yard is much smaller than I remember, the houses next door much closer, and the house itself much shabbier.  The lake looked the same though, at least the glimpse I got of it from the moving car. 

It was OK to see the house again after more than ten years.  It’s been almost 30 years since my family lived there, almost twice as many  years of someone else living in it than the years we occupied the property.  Seems like yesterday.