Saturday's Texas Adventure, Part 2

From the Huebner House, she wrote for the FOURTH time, I headed to a very special place for me, "The Grotto."

The Grotto was a strip of forest behind our house, with a creek tunning through it. For eight years, I walked through this strip to get to middle and high school, read books here against the trees, biked it's many paths, and finished homework listening to bird and wind whistling through the branches.

Time has claimed about two thirds of the grotto, which haven't been built up, but were cleared for flood control. The southern most third still looks exactly as it did forty years ago, though. The section across the street was a part I didn't hang around out in much, but is now a city park, so at least some of these woods will always exist.

From there I hit the old apartment complex I lived in for a few years. It has seen beter days. Several of the buildings have burned down, windows are smashed out...it was pretty snazzy when we moved in in 1980. Times have not been good for them. It's hard to tell the Halloween decorated apartments from the others.

The old "Rain Roost" the kids hid under during the rain for my first four years of elementary school is now just a patch of ground. The tree I sat in as a kid is still there, and going strong, though. The game room where I'd play Asteroids is a Mexican Restaurant now.

It wasn't until decades later that I found out the hill I struggled to bike up was actually THE Locke Hill.