Where I grew up

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Before World War 2, my father worked in Hartford Connecticut and his wife
in Boston Massachusetts.  They each had apartments where they worked and
got together on weekends.

After my father got out of the army, his wife got pregnant and they decided
they needed to do something else for living arrangements.  My father got a
transfer to the Boston office of the power company and went looking for a
house.
He got on a train and went to the last of the commuter stops.  It was a
small town that was mostly farms.
“This reminds me of home in Vermont,” he said.  They bought a house and my
father, his wife and my sister lived there for 5 years.

Then they built what is now the major loop road around Boston (128) through
his backyard.  Literally.  The house was taken by eminent domain to build
an exit ramp.
He found some property on a dead end a mile or so away.  He tried to buy
the whole dead end, but the developer said he’d only sell it to my father
if he paid for a house on every lot, even if no house was built.  My father
declined, but did pick up some extra woods behind the house that was
trapped between properties and couldn’t be built up.

The dead end, was on a hill made out of glacier droppings.  There were lots
of trees, but not much smaller would grow well due to the bad soil.  My
father and the other house owners on the hill trucked in quite a bit of
soil to get it to the point where grass would grow.  But, if you dug down
more than about 4 inches you’d come to the rock/clay/sand mixture that made
up the hill.
The neighbors to either side of us continued to add more soil to their
properties when I was young.  My father settled for enough to grow grass,
and not even much of that in the back yard.

Even after this there was about 2 acres of woods my father owned.  And,
when I was young and the housing boom only starting, a lot more woods
besides that.  Slowly as I grew up, more and more houses impinged on the
woods behind us, until my father’s was about the only woods left.  There
are still lots of trees, but now they are yards, not woods.

The small, mostly farm, town my father had moved to in order to get away
from the city and remind him of Vermont became one of the well off
neighborhoods around Boston.  In good part because of the highway that had
cost my father his first house.
Now there are homes everywhere.  On outcroppings of rock.  In the spaces
between other homes.
It’s horrible.
I can stand in my parent’s yard and look into the woods that seemed to go
on forever when I was young.  Now, I can see houses through the trees.

The house itself has lots of problems.  Due to the nature of my father’s
need, it was built very quickly and that showed.  It was about 10 years old
when I was born and still settling.  So, walls would crack, leaks would
show up in the roof, windows and doors would rarely shut well.
I remember when young having to climb up into the, very small, attic to put
pans under the eves of the roof to catch the water that leaked through in
the winter.

Slowly my father had these things repaired.  By the time I left, more than
30 years ago, it was in reasonably good condition.

It was haunted too.  The ghost of his first wife and her mother who both
died there 51 years ago.
Since I don’t go back there anymore, I don’t know if that is still going on
or not.
Either way, that’s a longer story for another time.