245 Langlois Street Southeast

A perfect storm in Forest Hills

My childhood home. My parents moved themselves, myself and my little sister (still in the womb) here in 2002 before we even had lawn. There are photos of me playing with toy construction vehicles in the dirt a few days before all the grass was planted the first spring. My parents were the first owners of this brand new home, in a brand new neighborhood. My whole childhood was packed into this house. While most of the kids in the neighborhood grew up and attended the Elementary School that was quite literally attached to the neighborhood (See Collins Elemantary School), my parents had different in mind for my sisters and I. We would attend a Spanish Immersion School a ways away called Ada Vista. We all are fluent in spanish to this day. (Thank you MOM and DAD) I was lucky enough to be surrounded with boys my age in what seemed like a quarter of the homes in my neighborhood. In reality, it was more like 12. That was plenty. As we all grew together, our friendships were ironclad and it would seem this would last forever. The Vineyards kids were inseparable. We maximized every single day in the summer together to the best of our abilities. It started getting great after we all got off our training wheels. Cops and robbers, ghost in the graveyard, and neighborhood-wide watergun fights were all fan favorites. Somehow, it all just worked out with no coordination. Watergun fights were the best, and the homeowners around the neighborhood were all alerted to our battles one way or another as sometimes you would have to take cover at some random house and fill up the tank using a stranger's hose and pump. I collected tree frogs in the summer and had a cage in my bedroom that had a frog's habitat in it. I seemed to find one every single summer. They would last a while! Dad and I would buy crickets over at the PetSmart once every couple weeks to keep these guys well fed. At 8 years old you are legally permitted to bike yourself to the neighborhood pool and swim. This was a massive milestone. Not only did you have to be 8, but your parents also had to be cool enough to release you into the streets with full trust you'd be back home, which was a fading art in the 2000s. Nowadays, I don't think this would happen ever. My parents split in '12 and Dad bought a house nearby. Growing up was a blur after that. Not sure what I did in the summers of 2013 and 2014. Once I got to high school I made some friends that could drive. Most of us neighborhood boys were at that age that we could tell our ages apart now, so naturally the circle got diced up into smaller circles. I stuck with my two guys who I was closest to in age and we are still buds to this day. Mom sold the house in 2019 and moved away. Whenever I come back home, it's tradition for me to drive by the old house. The neighborhood seems quite desolate these days, even in the summertime. Not sure what happened to the neighborhood in the last 10 years, but whatever us boys had in Summer of 2010 is not there any longer. I suppose it was a perfect storm. This neighborhood just needs a new generation of kids to breathe some life into it. When that happens, my rating of 5 stars will shine true once again.