Homing instinct

[fbhjr]

As discussed elsewhere, in the late 30’s my father fled Vermont to get away from his first fiancé so he could marry the second. He fled to what he considered the Deep South: Massachusetts. (Yeah, it was about 120 miles south of where he had been. He was the first one of the Hunts since the Revolutionary War to go that far south. Although, I’m given to understand, some went west as far as the Pacific…)
He and his wife lived in Boston for several years. After he got out of the army in 1947, they decided to buy a house.
My father wanted something fairly rural. So, he took the train out of Boston until the city stopped, went a couple more stops and got off.
Islington was a small section of Westwood. There were still farms there. It was on a commuter train line. It was right along Route 1, the main north/south road at the time. A 4 lane beltway circling Boston was a short ways away, so they could go all sorts of places in the new car they bought.
They bought a house a couple of blocks from the train station, just along route 1.
It was my father’s first house. It was where they were living when my sister was born.
Then in 1955, they decided to expand the beltway around Boston. They decided to double the size of route 128. They made what had been the 2 lanes in each direction the north lanes and added 4 more on the outside for the southbound.
This presented my father with a problem as the new exit ramps between those southbound lanes and route 1 were going to run through his house.
The state took the land by eminent domain and moved his house one town over to a town my father didn’t like as much. It was a bigger town, more traffic, more people, etc. So, he built a mirror image replica of his first house about 1 mile away from the old site on the other side of the train tracks, where he could still walk to the station.
The state eventually tried to give back a section of land about 15’ long and 10’ wide as they wanted their maps to have nice straight property lines on them. My father paid taxes on it for 20 more years until they tried to charge him sewer tax on it. He refused to pay it and the town took the land from him.

When I was in Junior High School, my friends and I found a great place to go and play. No one ever bothered us. No one ever told us we were too loud. We never had to worry about breaking anything. There was a stream with fish and crayfish in it. It was a great place.
It was the area inside the exit ramps between Route 128 and Route 1. To get there you had to crouch down and walk through the 4’ diameter drainage pipes.

It is only now, 30 years after I used to play there, that I realize it would have been the back yard of my father’s first house.