You CAN Go Home Again

Today I went for a bicycle ride, but instead of going around my hometown or to the country or to Central Park in Manhattan, I decided to do something different. I transported my bike to the Fayson Lakes district of Kinnelon, New Jersey, where I used to live when I was a toddler.

It was astonishing, but virtually everything was the same as it was when I was four. My own former residence has burnt-yellow siding instead of the white siding my family had on it when I was a kid, but everything else is the same. The house sits along one of the lakes in the district, with a lush green backyard along the shoreline and an island a few yards out; my father and I used to go over there in our rowboat and eat lunch. The nearby houses are the same as I remember, including all the mock-log-cabin houses that pop up all over the place.

On West Fayson Lake (my house was on South Fayson Lake), the beach my mother and I went to is still the same, with gleaming white sand, and the locals still take sailboats - with the same bicolored sails - out on the water. I remember West Fayson Lake being as large as Lake Michigan when I was little; it's not really that big, of course. :-) The island across from my old lakefront backyard as big isn't as big as I remember either, and it's not as far from the shore as I thought. It was always cool to go over there, because it was like my own private play area. :-)

My old neighborhood was rather small, and I was able to cover a lot of ground with whatever plastic cycle - my Go-Go Cycle, my Big Wheel, my toy motorcycle - I had at the time. One time I almost made it up the hill to the main road - I wanted to go to the store for my mother! - before she stopped me. :-D

One thing I also remember from my childhood in Fayson Lakes was a graveyard - that's right, a graveyard - in the middle of the development near my house. I distinctly remembered my father and I walking through there once or twice, but when I went back to Fayson Lakes a couple of years ago, I couldn't find it. This time I did - by accident. Called Frederick's Cemetery, after the family with the largest plot in it, it's a tiny burial ground in which people from the nineteenth and early twentieth century - that is, people who lived in the once-rural region before it was suburbanized - are interred, and it's only three houses down from where I used to live. Forested and overgrown, it has no gate around it and, from the street, it looks like an unused piece of woodland. (There's now a sign indicating its presence.) What I remember most about it was a single small headstone with only one word - "MOTHER" - inscribed on it. And so, I went into the burial yard from the front entrance to look for that headstone.

I didn't find it, but I did find several headstones dating back 170 years, along with several graves of Civil War veterans. Someone is nice enough to place American flags on the veterans' graves, but the cemetery is mostly abandoned and wild, with weeds and ground cover growing everywhere making most of the paths impassable. The paths themselves had been marked with whitewashed stones, but most of these were either gone or out of place. One family plot wth an iron-rail fence around it had fallen into complete disrepair, and some headstones had deteoriated to the point where you couldn't even read them. This was no way to treat what is clearly an histroic place. I obviously couldn't go too far into the yard to look for the "MOTHER" headstone.

Failing to find it, I rode around the neighborhood again, and as I passed the cemetery again, I noticed a path leading into the back of the graveyard. I went back in there through this path, but I still couldn't find the headstone. Then I noticed a large, intricately carved headstone that looked new, but was clearly of Victorian vintage. I walked up to it to examine it more closely; it was the grave of one Sidney Frederick, who died in 1874. There was a hole clean through the monument where a picture of the deceased had once been. Touching it, I found that the "stone" was in fact cast-iron, explaining in part why it still looked fairly new after 130 years. Then, out of the corner of my eye, behind the cast-iron marker, I saw it - it - the "MOTHER" headstone. Out of surprise I pointed to it and shouted out, "There it is!"

There it was, indeed - the "MOTHER" headstone. Part of the Frederick plot, it had obviously been for one of the matriarchs of the family, though it was never clear whose mother it was for. It was just as I remembered it from 35 years ago, just like everything else.

My mom's biggest regret was that we had to move, but my dad got transferred to another state - though that story is for another time. Had we stayed there, I might have gotten antsy as I got older, with most of the stores, restaurants, and other traditional public spaces accessible only by car - Kinnelon doesn't really have much of a central business district - but for a toddler, the Fayson Lakes region was paradise. (Well, except for the graveyard, which was kind of spooky. . . .)

And it's still the same after all these years. :-)

P.S. I rode my bike up that hill to the main road today. This time I made it to the top - and got to go farther! :-D