
One
highlight of our trip was revisiting Brookings, S. Dakota, where I
lived till I was about 14, in this house. There's a new
addition in back that eats up about half of the back yard, where my
father had built a covered patio. I remember the layout of our
house well, from the small entry way with a bench seat that stored
winter boots, to the living, dining, and kitchen rooms on the first
floor. There was a steep stairway going up from the side door to
the second floor, which was very fun to slide down on in a cardboard
box. The second floor held the only bathroom and 3 and a half
bedrooms (I got the half bedroom, being youngest). I especially
enjoyed the attic with old stuff in it, and basement with the
woodshop and my chemistry set...
The changes in
the neighborhood were many, and it was interesting to try to overlay my
memories with the current geography. All the houses in the
neighborhood seemed to have much smaller yards than I remembered, and a
lot of the fences were gone that had separated them. My
existence there was very compact--just three blocks walk to the school,
the library, downtown, and church. Gone from the downtown were
the movie theater, drug store, Ben Franklin's and Woolworth's,
Juel's shoe store, clothing stores, and mail order Sears store I
remembered-- replaced by Walmart and other big box stores at the edge
of town. Nick's Burgers was still there, where I used to eat once in a while when my family was elsewhere.
My old elementary school had been successfully converted to a
children's museum, and the Cargnegie library got a larger location
nearby and is now a community building. The swimming pool, that I
remember bicycling a long ways to get to, was about 8 blocks from my
home, atop the almost unnoticeable only hill in town (source for the
name Hilcrest Park). Eastern S. Dakota is so flat that the
nearest sledding hill was 30 miles away, in Minnesota...