After we married in 1985, my husband and I rented our first three places, and finally purchased a home in 1992 when I was pregnant with our oldest daughter. We mostly fell in love with the setting. Feeling remote, yet close to highways, it offered a 15 minute commute to work. The Cahaba River wasn’t accessible from the property, but it was nearby. Heavily wooded, we could only see three other houses. In fact, the house was in such an isolated area that it took a week to restore power after the infamous March snowstorm of 1993.To access the house, the approaching street wound through the middle of a horse farm, Patchwork Farms.
I’m rarely in this neighborhood again. We moved out in 2002 to an entirely different part of town. There was no need to go back, and I hadn’t kept up with old neighbors. I wasn’t aware of the possible changes until I read a newspaper article in 2007 about the sale of the 82 acre farm to the city of Vestavia Hills for $11 million.
Then the resale began, parcel by parcel, to various enterprises: Lifetime Fitness, Publix, a senior independent living facility, a rehab hospital, a strip mall, and an apartment complex. I read about this development and would occasionally drive through the old neighborhood to see the changes, my heart sinking as I witnessed the piecemeal takeover of all that beautiful pastureland. The land was now a patchwork of disjointed and unrelated projects.
My latest foray into the old neighborhood crushed me almost completely. First, a large sign announced a new building project with a hotel and shops. In my memory, the farm, though large, was a simple affair with a couple of barns, a house, pastures, and a few scattered mature oak trees. It was so hard for me to imagine that Patchwork Farms had enough acreage to accommodate all this “progress.”
Second, there had been a forested area adjacent to the farm where we would go on family hikes. Primitive trails meandered through the thicket of deciduous trees and ubiquitous pines. Well, that forest is gone now, replaced by at least a dozen huge houses on equally huge lots. Not a tree in sight.
Only my memory can reforest and re-pasture the area.
After viewing the heart-stopping destruction of parts of the larger neighborhood, I drove on. Tears of relief threatened to spill when I discovered that our old house and its immediate surroundings were not much changed. My memory began to repopulate this one small patch of land with a young couple and two infant daughters who grew into childhood here.
It’s the memories from those years with my young family, nestled in the woods above the river, that I will treasure: watching our daughters use a net to catch and release the lone goldfish that somehow thrived in the tiny pond, a funeral for said goldfish buried next to its pond (“He was a good fish”), a wandering toddler with her canine companion, picking wild blackberries in the backyard while the children napped, finding a caterpillar on a fennel plant, then placing it in a Mason jar, and nurturing it into a butterfly.
Patchwork Farms may have been transformed into an unsightly crazy quilt of development, but memories of my daughters as infants transforming into children are among the most beautiful transformations I have witnessed.