A very good friend had this great idea to show maps of where we grew up. My mom is probably going to pitch a fit after I post this map of where I lived the first ten years of my life. Our trailer was on the second row from the east about halfway up. (Link to Google map).

I had actually planned on breaking the news that I lived in a mobile home to you, my faithful readers, whilst describing my trip this summer, but this seems like a perfect opportunity. There is plenty that I have left to say, but for now, let’s just describe what has changed.

The biggest change is the amount of development. The neighborhood is still an island in the middle of cornfields, but all of those subdivisions — which continue west into Saylor Township and south to Des Moines — are new. The county was building the highway to the north when we moved, but it only became a multilane highway much more recently. Beyond it, the state research farm still appears active. It was a munitions factory during WWII, and if you look closely, you can make out roughly twenty mounds that were bunkers for the weapons. My father used to clean the building when he was a student at the Faith Baptist Bible College a mile or so further north, just beyond the John Deere assembly plant; which is not the same factory where my grandfather built tractors in Waterloo, Iowa. My mother, several years later went to the community college just down the road to the east as one part of her multiyear, multistate endeavor to get a B.A. in accounting and raise a family (mostly on her own). God bless community colleges and affordable housing. But I digress.

The old neighborhood itself (i.e., the “park”) doesn’t seem to have changed much except for the addition of about ten houses in the northwest corner, which (if my memory serves me well) used to be the site of the sewage lagoon. Apparently, everyone got county services. How Iowan of me: giving directions to something based on a place or thing that no longer exists . . . .