When Monessen Was Home

I took a long ride yesterday and ended up at our old house.  A beautiful day and a child's nap called me and my bike to the road and I wanted to run to little Washington just because I hadn't been there for a long while.  No plan after I got there, but the merge to the Fort Pitt Tunnel and the rush of the highway traffic is always an adventure.

I wandered the tiny town for a bit and then headed east on 70 toward Philly and NYC.  The highway quickly bored me and I saw a pair of country roads so I took the next exit and hopped on the path.  It paralleled the highway in a general sense but twisted and turned, rose and fell.  This must have been the only road decades ago before the intrusion of the divided four lane and I really had to brake hard, shift fast, and check out all the old farmsteads.

Soon I saw signs for Charleroi where Dad used to work and Monongahela where we went to church.  I took the road to Charleroi and wandered the old steel town which still has parallel one-way streets that used to support block upon block of small businesses.

I almost decided to head home after that, but I saw the sign for Monessen, crossed the bridge and found another pair of parallel one-way streets supporting even fewer active businesses.  Having visited a few times in the past decades, I knew how to get to the old house and wanted to snap some images to share with my family.

It used to have huge pine trees near the road and no front porch.

Tough driveway for the winter

They've enclosed the porch and removed the outdoor fireplace.

 They trust Dad's handiwork with the Camaro 35 years later.

I usually don't think I have memories of my early years, but along some of those streets I flashed on long walks that we took as a family in training for summer hikes.  I remembered playing football for the first time at a neighbor's house and dragging some kid along who was trying to tackle me.  I remember falling from a tree, getting scratched by our cat in heat, taking the snake for slithers in the back yard, and hitting up the corner store for Charleston Chews and baseball cards with that powdery stick of gum.  Our first cat I named "Meow Mix" and one of her litters after all the characters in "Welcome Back Kotter."  Later kittens were named after elven princesses in "The Lord of the Rings."

I talked to the owner and got a tour of the house about 15 years ago.  Everything was the same inside.  He told me that the big pine trees had started rotting and had to be taken down.  I asked about the fireplace - it had just fallen apart over the years.  I told him my Dad had built that railroad tie off-street parking space and he said "Well, that thing ain't goin' nowhere."

It's good to go back and remember sometimes.  That was 1979.