Way Back 1709

Way back in the early 1900’s Joyce’s grandpa bought a house in south Saint Louis. This is it below.

He bought it for $1700 and moved his bride into it. As you can see from the picture it was pretty much by itself.

Joyce’s grandma died in the late 1950’s and her grandpa lived alone in it until around 1971 when he needed to be in a care facility. Joyce’s family members did not want to take the house and decided to sell it. The house was in need of a lot of work to upgrade it. Joyce had fond memories of staying there with her grandma and grandpa and would have liked to buy it.

I still had three more years in the navy and was due for orders to the west coast so I/we passed on buying it. I know Joyce would have loved to own the house but the timing was not right and things would not have worked out then.

In the eighties we were in Saint Louis and heard that $1700 house had been upgraded and was listed for sale at $74,000. I suppose we missed an opportunity there, but as I think about it I realize had we bought the house and moved there after I got out of the navy our lives would have been very different. We would never have had the 10 years we lived in San Diego after I got out of the navy and missed out on all the wonderful people we knew there, friends we still have today. We would never had the farm we lived on for 27 years and our daughter Annie would never have met our son-in -law Rhett and there would never have been our granddaughter Hailey. I console myself with the thought that the guiding hand from above brought us to where we are today and things worked out as they were meant to be.

Sometimes in life things do not go the way we want them to, but I still think things always work out for the best. That is what Joyce’s grandma told her when Joyce was a child and I think grandma was correct. We may not realize how or why things happen for decades or a lifetime, but things really do happen for the best for us. We can never know what we missed or what we avoided.