Early 2020: What I miss about 601 Oak Farm Court

Mostly, it's the memories.

We moved to 601 Oak Farm Court (OFC) in March 1996, twenty-four years ago. We left OFC twenty-two years later. Jane was a month old when we moved to OFC; Gaby was born 1n 1998. This is the home where both girls graduated. It's where we had the play groups, the birthday parties and Gaby's basement bashes. After Gaby left for college, it was just not the same. We could have stayed there for another 25 years but it was time to think about what those next twenty-five years would bring. After twenty years it was time to either seriously upgrade and stay another twenty years, or to sell and move to the next stage of our lives in another home.

I have only the fondest and best memories of this home, its features, its quirks, its location, our neighborhood. There are times when I think about how our life would be had we stayed at OFC, but I mostly draw a void. Jane and Gaby had moved out and on, unlikely to come back other than for visits. We had no close attachments to neighbors or the immediate community. Most of our time at OFC had been focused on Jane and Gaby, their education, their sports, their friends, and their formation. For me, Loyola was a job I did to provide for my family, to insure their future, to make a contribution to the lives of my students, and to earn a little satisfaction from the academic life. Unlike their parents, Gaby and Jane are Baltimore natives and Baltimore will always be the foundation of their lives. So leaving OFC was necessary but not without misgivings or great memories. But I will always have the great memories of watching the family grow and prosper and of basic parenting.

I miss how Dena managed the household, earned her masters degree, worked a number of jobs outside the home, and managed a coterie of female friends. I relish all the good memories she created for me, with the holiday meals, the pumpkin picking, the cutting of the Christmas tree, the trips to York, Pocomoke City, and Frederick. I sorely miss the great dinners we had at Aldo's and even the 'date night' meals at the local eateries like Yasou, Cafe Isis, Bagelworks, Vito's Cafe and, yes, McDonalds.

What else did I miss? My three women would agree that I took excessive pride in out lawn and its maintenance -- my emerald domain. I was Master of the Emerald Domain. I loved being able to look out over the crisply patterned front and back lawns. With the significant hill I had to mow, I miss the result, and not the effort. However, maintaining the lawn was getting more difficult as I aged, after two replaced hips. That dilemma -- pleasure versus pain -- was part of the calculus behind our move. I miss the cleared out woods that we cleared out over the years, culminating in a massive clearing late in our stay.

I missed the quiet of the cup de sac, with so little traffic and so much tranquility. Combined with the woods behind us, we lived between two buffers from the traffic and the noise of suburban Baltimore living. In the winter, we could sometimes hear traffic from nearby I-83 and in late summer we could hear the music from the State Fair concerts, but for the vast majority of the time, we had literal peace and quiet. Shortly before our decision to leave there was a spate of small home burglaries that troubled the tranquility of what had long seemed like an area insulated from crime. That, along with the continuing crumbling of Baltimore, made us interested in leaving the Baltimore area and, most likely, Maryland.

I miss having three floors and the ability to isolate myself, if only for short periods of time, to read, to work out, or simply to chill out in silence. On the other hand, I miss the excitement of watching Jane and Gaby progress and excel in their sports -- swimming, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, field hockey -- and the extended sports families from Notre Dame Prep, St Joe's and Lutherville-Timonium teams. Sunday CYO games, basketball tryouts and practices, travel and rec soccer tournaments and playoffs, and innumerable practices kept me busy, driving and cheering a lot of great successes on the field and court. I remember Jane earning an invite to play AAU basketball; I recall the first time Gaby made the LTRC travel team. I remember all of Jane's basketball games with Claire Ford and Gaby's CYO game where she scored all of St. Joe's points (other than the 'own goal' basket scored by Peg Doerfler's grand daughter) in a CYO game. I remember Jane's PK victory in her last year of soccer and Gaby's winning PK against Caroline Kelly's team in her last year of rec soccer.

I don't miss the general maintenance and repairs that increased as OFC aged. don't miss thew thirty-inch snow falls or the time I had to abandon my car in heavy snow in front of Marshall's, trying to return from Loyola after an Open House. I certainly do not miss the creaking exteriors on those very windy winter nights. I don't miss the traffic. I don't miss witnessing the slide into hopelessness that faced many people living in Baltimore, with crime, poverty and a horrible public education system.

For all my life I will relish the joy that my family brought me while we lived at Oak Farm Court.