A HUNDRED ACRES OF HEAVEN

Early summer 1958 my family moved from Hobe Sound, (a place tantamount to paradise in my mind) back up the coast to Stuart.  My father had just landed a high paying job there and understandably wanted a shorter drive to work. Still I was quite unhappy about moving. I loved our rental home on the Intracoastal Waterway and its proximity to the ocean. Nothing could top that, I thought!

But I was wrong! We moved into a sprawling house in the middle of a hundred acres. A private lake graced the front and several small ponds were scattered in the back, along with a fresh water spring.

The lake was beautiful! It formed in a lopsided figure eight with a little arched white bridge over the narrowest part. We frequently fished there. Also we had a small blue row boat. Wild ducks lived on the lake and later my grandfather added tame ones, too. On the south side was a mango grove and all around was an abundance of beautiful nature. It was just like living in a private park! To enter the property, one had to drive thru huge white gates.

The house was by far the largest and best one ever! Visitors often asked if we got lost. My favorite room was the spacious library. It featured a fireplace, a beautiful Oriental carpet, and a big picture window overlooking the lake. This adjoined a large family room with high glass windows on 3 sides that half overlooked the lake and half overlooked the mango grove. The home had long halls on opposite sides. At the end of one stood a spot that could be transformed into a room surrounded by nothing but a circle of doors. My friends and I used to sit in the middle with a candle and tell ghost stories. The house even featured a special room to enjoy coffee and dessert overlooking the lake. This place was nothing short of amazing!

As before, we were only renters, but my parents assured me that we would not be moving again. The owner was a German with a "VON" in front of his last name. How cool was that! These truly were days of splendor.

Only months after moving there, my father bought me my heart's desire, a horse! Suddenly, I became quite the popular little girl! Now, lots of kids wanted to visit and ride it. They also enjoyed the rowboat, plus we swam in the big front lake and the back pond closest to the house. Of course we had to be wary of alligators, (a real problem in Florida) but the element of danger added to the fun! Friends invited other friends, even older kids now wanted to know me. I reveled in my good fortune and thought it would last forever, but sadly life doesn't work that way.

My glorious childhood was soon to end.

One day, the owner came to visit and noticed the horse. Suddenly our rent went up! My parents grumbled, but paid. But it was quickly raised again, and again! My folks were livid; we were maintaining these vast acres at our own expense! But apparently the guy didn't want a horse on his property.

Yes, the horse was temperamental and did some damage, but it was repaired at our expense.

One afternoon I came home from school and the horse was gone. He'd been sold! I was sad, but not surprised. My parents felt he was dangerous and had become a potential lawsuit as well as a rent issue.

Then one autumn evening as my family sat around watching the nightly news, my brother asked our mother, "Do you want to start taking stuff over to the new house, tomorrow?"

"New house!!!" I exclaimed. "What new house???"

"We've moving," Mom replied in a casual tone. "We bought a house on the St. Lucie River."

This was a major shock! I wasn't aware they had been even shopping for a house!

"But I love it here!" I protested.

"Oh, but you'll like this new house much better!" my grandfather replied.

Well I HATED it from the moment I saw it! It was less than half the size of the lake house and the inside had a weird clinical feel. It stood on barely one acre with noisy and intrusive neighbors around us. I felt closed in. Nothing about it felt like home to me!

Perhaps it was bad Feng shiu, strangely our lives all seemed to quickly unravel and go downhill after moving there.

My brother was drafted into the army. He was later honorably discharged due to medical issues, but became a different person after discovering alcohol, there. My grandfather died a year after our move. We quickly went from a family of five to a family of three. My mother's unhinged nature emerged and expanded 10 fold. The toxic fallout landed fully on me. Five years later my father lost his job thru no fault of his own. Our lives continued on that downward path with many far worse things yet to come.

Living there, I felt as if I was treading water with sharks in the distance circling closer, while at the same time struggling not to drown. That feeling has never gone away.

My father finally sold that place in 1998 and I was delighted. We moved to Vero Beach in January of 99.

Our river house was hardly cheap, by 1960 standards the price was considered high end. However, we were actually paying for the mile wide river view and the 150 ft dock, below. This is what my mother fell in love with and why we bought that house.

She imagined living there would be like heaven, she told me later, but instead experienced only misery. Well, the previous place had felt like heaven to me!

For decades to come, not one single day would pass when I did not think of the lake house. I often dreamed of buying it. My heart would sink whenever we drove past the property.

In my late 30's, I heard the property had been sold to a developer. I was horrified to learn the lake and all the ponds had been filled killing everything in them. And the wild ducks would no longer have a home there. Also the mango grove had been bulldozed. My father said all of this was done to create ground to build more houses.

This threw me deeper into darker depths of depression during an already wretched period. I'm thankful every day those times are gone.

Our lives are made up of not just chapters, but many entirely different books and I'm not ready for this one to end. My current home is the one that restored my happiness.

Each day is filled with an assortment of joys and victories and I savor all of my small creature comforts. They make it worth living. But if I had the power, I would return to being eight years old again and freeze that time forever! My world felt almost magical then! Money or health worries were as remote as the constellation Cassiopeia. It was a period consisting of pure joy and peace of mind, now gone forever.