When my father last visited, we went to the lake around which he grew up, and he got it into his head to tromp through the swamp at one end, because he wanted to see the horse pasture and apple trees located between the undeveloped side of the lake and the back end of a farm. Apparently, the neighborhood kids spent many fine hours in those apple trees, watching the horses and eating the fruit. The path they used to follow is gone, and we slogged through overgrown swamp, trying to walk on rushes we crushed, in order to avoid sinking in the muck. It was an adventure, memorialized by the blackish brown stains on the hems of everybody's pant legs. The horses are gone now, and the trees. And yet, I was glad that my sons had the chance at a peek into their grandfather's boyhood.

At the other end of the development scale, what used to be a farm field now has a road named after my father-in-law. That happens when you build the road.