The girls and I stopped in at the bookstore Friday to get a few last minute summer reads for them.  School starts soon but they were still  trying to get some pleasure reading in before the homework starts and keeps them from reading for enjoyment.

They were walking in front of me when I saw a table with a display of a book titled “Lost Toledo” by David Yonke.      http://www.davidyonke.com/

The girls kept going and I picked it up and thought, I wonder if our house is in here?  Really I was not expecting it to be there.  But it is!  I laughed and the girls turned around.  I opened to the photo of our house and said “Our house is in this book!”  There is a picture and a brief history.  We got a lot of strange looks from other shoppers and added it to our pile.

I am still having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that we didn’t just move to a new house.  We live in a house that is a part of Toledo history, that shares a history with Jeep through former resident John North Willys and that many people feel a connection to.  We don’t often mention to people what house we live in.  We just say a house in the Old West End.  Living in a home that  people keep referring to as a cornerstone home adds weight to the process of restoring/renovating/rescuing this house.  We know that financially we will never get back what we put into this house.  But along the way we are making it a home.  It will be the place we have birthday parties and Christmas mornings. Prom pictures and wedding photos will be taken in the stairwell with a backdrop of stained glass windows. Grandchildren will visit someday.  It will be a piece of Toledo’s history as well as our family history.  Hopefully the love we put into this house will allow it to be one of the cornerstone homes of the neighborhood for another hundred years and be a place where other families will make memories  add to the history.