Lucky – My Parents’ New Home

Our home in Walnut Creek, California, was located adjacent to the I-680 freeway. If you are familiar with California and our ever-growing traffic, freeways are constantly being widened. In 1988, there was to be a start of a major renovation and widening project through Walnut Creek and my parents’ home was to become a casualty.

CalTrans, the transportation department for the State of California, contacts the people who own land where they want to widen and offer funds to be resettled. I believe they had real estate agents help my mother view comparable homes by price in Walnut Creek that they could move into.

My mother hated them all.

You see, we lived on a narrow, one-lane country road right in the middle of town. There were about a dozen houses. One side of the road was in the city limits of Walnut Creek, the other side in the county. Mature trees surrounded our homes. No sidewalks. The neighbor to our south had horses. At the end of the street was access to Las Trampas Creek. Below, see my sister skating on our street.

The houses the agent were showing my mother were located in housing developments. Cookie-cutter houses on wide streets with sidewalks. Few trees surrounded the houses and the houses were very close to each other. To her, these were not comparable houses.

Luck would have it, that the house across the street, owned by the Potters, was available for purchase. The Potters were friends, who invited us kids over often to swim in their pool or to babysit their grandchildren. It seemed they could not live alone anymore and their children found them an assisted living facility. Through negotiations, my parents purchased the Potter home.

The driveway to the left is to the Potter's.

CalTrans arranged for the packing and moving of my parents’ home, loading up the truck and driving across the street to unload and unpack the truck.

My parents spent many years there. They had backyard barbeques and in-door holiday dinners. The my widowed father accepted an offer to see from a developer, who purchased three properties and built several homes at the end of the street. That was the end of our family’s life on Paulson Lane.

Nice patio & barbeque

#52Ancestors: Lucky

This is my sixth year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow (https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/) at Generations Cafe. I write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or My Trails into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.

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