Sweet pajamaed cousins watching TV. They spent most of the day outside, where they were excited to not be freezing cold! Carigan loved Noah's Trek bike and loved having a place to ride it freely. She's our first kid to pick up this bike-riding business all by herself. Hopefully Tate will follow suit, because we're getting too old to run behind a bicycle for years like we had to do for Wesley and Anna Kate!
Goodbye, Virginia house! Lots of fun memories here, and lots of fun memories ahead in Chattanooga!
As we were driving home on Saturday, we started passing signs for Concord. I haven't been back to North Carolina to see my old stomping grounds from when we lived there from 1987-1989 since Dad took me over spring break my senior year in 1997. Michael asked if I wanted to exit and I said yes. I lived in Harrisburg, but went to First Assembly Christian School in Concord for 4th grade. I typed the name of the school into my phone and had it direct us there. I messaged my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Raffaldt on Facebook to see if she was nearby. She replied to send her my phone number, and we pulled into the parking lot with me talking to her on the phone (first time I've heard her voice since 1997!). It was pretty cool because I had her right there on the phone to ask questions. She said it's all exactly the same except for the solarium they added to the front there beneath the name of the school. I was a student here when they moved into this building! We started the school year in a mobile unit out in a parking lot next to their original location on Rockland Circle. We made the exciting move into this brand new building after Christmas break. It was new and shiny and the bathrooms didn’t have stalls yet, but Mrs. Raffaldt warned us not to snicker. She started the year as Miss Keever and got married over Christmas break. She invited me to the wedding and I was listed in the program as an honored guest. I remember behind so proud - fanciest wedding I had ever been to and I was in awe. It was her second year of teaching, and now she’s been teaching for almost 30 years! We weren't able to meet up, because when I messaged her she was driving in the opposite direction to a ball game. But it was so surreal to get to talk to her and see the building again. It looks the same! They've added a playground now. They hadn't built a playground yet when I was there, and I remember walking down these steeps steps in an embankment at the back of the parking lot to a plain blacktop where we would just skip rope and play with balls. The steep embankment is still there, but the steps are gone, and they've build a new high school building down where the blacktop was.
From Concord I programmed the address of our house in Harrisburg into the GPS, and it was closer than I thought - I remember it being a really long drive, but it was less than 20 minutes. It took us a different way than we took on our daily commute, because I remember driving past the motor speedway for much of the drive back then (we'd pass large pillars denoting numbered entrances). We appeared to go a back way instead, and we passed an eerily abandoned historic complex that was encased in barbed wire. An old arched sign we passed under identified it as the Stonewall Jackson School. It was a state juvenile facility established in 1909. The original buildings are all still there - beautiful but dilapidated. It really was like passing a ghost! Google it! We followed the GPS to our house (8601 Wellington Lane - I still remember the address!). I recognized absolutely nothing in Harrisburg - Dad said there was nothing there but the old school and a gas station back then. Now thee are shopping centers and a giant brand new Publix store. None of it was there when we lived there. I was also unfamiliar with the way we entered the neighborhood, but our street looked the same and our house was easy to find. Mom infamously chose to have it painted red, and it always stood out amidst the more generic-colored homes in the neighborhood. The realtors in charge of selling it for us after IBM gave us its appraised value when we moved to Kentucky promptly painted it taupe. It's a lighter color now, and the shutters are missing. It didn't look as well maintained as the homes around it. But it's still very recognizable as our house - front yard well house and all. I remember winding down and crossing railroad tracks to get to our house, but now there's a bridge that crosses over the tracks and it's at a different location from where we used to cross. Now you're just instantaneously back in town.
I tried to find Harrisburg Elementary (where I attended 3rd grade) but when we put it in the GPS and pulled in, I immediately knew it was not the same school or the same site. Some googling revealed that the original Harrisburg School (built in 1926 for grades 1-11. 12th grade was added in 1942, and it later became the elementary) was demolished in 2001 when the new elementary was built. One of those new shopping centers now stands where the old school once stood. So sad to see these beautiful old buildings replaced with ugly modern schools - My middle school, the old Versailles High School built in 1927, was demolished just this past December. But at lest that building is very well documented (inside and out) in photos easily found online. The old Harrisburg School seems to have disappeared with hardly a trace. After hours & hours of googling on the drive home, I was able to uncover only this single photograph (divided into two frames) that appeared in the back of a 1953 yearbook. I couldn't find a single modern photo of it. It's shocking that is was demolished and no one took the time to document anything. I spent so long searching that I even emailed the local historical society. They replied by sending me this same single photo I had found myself online. Unfortunately, this photo does not show the side that I remember the most - Mom would drop me off and pick me up there in the back of the building, and I remember a bricked-in exterior staircase that I would climb to my classroom, which would have been in that very back wing of the school.
I remember going to music class in the one-story adjacent building shown to the right of the original building in the yearbook. I hope to one day uncover more photos - I clearly remember the gym, the library, the playground, the huge coat closet where they would like up cups of Kool-Aid to let us drink on scorching hot days as we had no AC. I remember my mom was horrified by how old and dangerous she felt the building was - she always describes a heavy metal ceiling fan dangling by a thread. Ultimately my parents moved us to the private school the next year. But I have pretty fond memories of this school. My best friends were Molly Moore (whose mother had just died of cancer) and Renee Love. My teacher was Mrs. Turner, a thin elegant older woman with a smoker's voice. But the more maternal presence was the assistant teacher, Mrs. Terry, who loved on us and who I remember pulling me out in the hall one day to tell me that Mary (a very shy girl from a ultra religious family who always had to wear long skirts and never cut her hair) told her mother that I had pinned her to the ground on the playground and made her say "uncle." Mrs. Terry said she knew that wasn't true and was totally ready to tell Mary's mother she was wrong. Imagine her shock when I smiled proudly and said, "Yep, I did that." Ha. The look on Mrs. Terry's face was priceless! My friends were out sick or something one day and I decided to be very kind and ask Mary to play. In my head it was very chivalrous of me. I showed her how Molly and I played. I remember giving her the rules of the game, saying "Now you say uncle," smiling gently. When Mrs. Terry pulled me into the hallway, I thought "Yes, I knew my kindness would be rewarded!" So funny. I didn't get in trouble for the incident, and I still wont the Best Citizenship Award for the class that year. Still makes me laugh. Maybe one day more photos of this school will be uncovered. I hope so!
