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MawMaw used to take us over to her mother's house on Sunday afternoons once in a while. My little brother and I would play in the yard while the elders talked on the back patio in the shade of some mature maples. The lot beside her house was an expansive yard, by a kid's standards, and served as a great playing field for games of wiffle ball. First base was adjacent to a giant garden that my great grandfather used till and harvest with his hands. I can remember the black raspberries that grew in the backyard behind the potato barn, the grape boughs and vines that grew in the shade of the weeping willow tree, and the crabapples that we weren't supposed to eat.

Both of my great grandparents were of a rural agricultural upbringing as were many folks back then, back home. Granny used to tell us stories about raising her three daughters in that house back when most of the surrounding homes that we saw didn't even exist. Most of what we saw then as children was actually farmland years before. She told us how she took a job at a store down the street so she could keep an eye on her house where the kids were. She said she watched a lot of things change through the windows of that store during the years she worked there.
I wondered then, as a child, at how different the world must have looked to her. I mused at the thought of seeing all the stores and streets that surround her house suddenly erased, taking the scene backward in time to when she was a young one as well.
Together my great grandparents acceptingly watched tracts of farmland bisected and dissected by road after road, watching homes spring from the ground where corn once stood and stared at the sunsets as the skyline of the Blue Ridge changed with commerce and enterprise.
It must have looked so different. Life must have been different. I could not imagine. And yet, now some 25 years later when I pass down Linden Avenue nothing looks the same. The lot disappeared years ago after the games had ended and the boys had grown into men. I have to squint my mind to see the trees that lined the street, the embankment that swallowed hard hits into left field, the great garden and clay rich soil PawPaw worked so diligently- the garden he had his heart attack in. It is all different now, again.
Condominiums cramp one side of the old house where I used to tear leaves from the weeping willow's dejected boughs. Apartments blanket center field and doctors.. offices sit ironically close to where the heart failed in a good

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