We were enjoying our front yard in Elmhurst, Ill., on a sunny Saturday morning when a man quietly walked up the driveway.
He said he was on his way back from visiting his grandmother's grave at a nearby cemetery. But seeing me, my husband, Shawn, and our two girls playing brought back a rush of memories that compelled him to stop and introduce himself.
He and his four siblings grew up in our house. They'd spent their entire childhoods playing in our yard.
I was skeptical at first, but the man, Mike Kopp, quickly erased any doubt by recounting a history that meshed perfectly with the little bit we knew about our 70-something-year-old Cape Cod.
His grandparents built the house in the 1930s, then sold it to his parents shortly after they were married in 1957. Kopp's parents raised four sons and a daughter in the house, where they collected too many stories to count: hitting baseballs into the neighbor's windows; walking to school with other children on the street; falling asleep to the sound of trains passing through downtown Elmhurst.
After all the kids were grown, Kopp's parents sold the house in 2003 and moved to Wisconsin. We bought the house last year from those next owners.
"Would you like to come inside and have a look?" I offered, but Kopp politely refused.
"I'd get too emotional," he said, adding that he was just glad to know another family was enjoying the house -- and not tearing it down to build something new, as has happened with so many others on the block.
The visit lasted no longer than 10 minutes, but the conversation stayed with Shawn and me for weeks. Shawn regretted not asking Kopp more about architectural mysteries that have puzzled him since we moved in.
And I suddenly felt a personal bond with people I'd never met. I began trying to picture the earlier generations living in our beloved space. Did the kids play hide-and-seek in the attic, as I envision our children doing someday? Did his mother hang photos of family milestones in the living room the way I do? Did tall men in their family bump their heads on the low ceiling near the kitchen?
After I tracked down Kopp, he was happy to answer my follow-up questions.
I was struck by how many similarities our families shared, despite the decades between us.
He and his brothers did, in fact, play hide-and-seek in the attic. At one point, he said with a chuckle, they even convinced some kids from the neighborhood that they had an elevator in there.
His mother, Arlene Kopp, didn't hang photos in the living room, but she did insist on putting up the Christmas tree in the same spot in the room I chose last winter. She also loved to cut lilacs and peonies from the same bushes I used to fill vases around the house this spring.
Like us, the family loved the location because it was walkable to downtown Elmhurst and the nearest elementary school. They packed their garage with bicycles, sleds and one family car, just as we do. They, too, had way too many winter coats jammed into the closet by the front door.
But then Kopp mentioned differences that pointed to how much times have changed.
Before the 1974 addition of a family room and master bedroom, he and his brothers shared one bedroom upstairs -- two sets of bunk beds in the room where my daughter, who is almost 4, now sleeps alone.
He recalled the way he and his siblings spent a lot of time in their unfinished basement because the house didn't have central air conditioning, like it does now. Kopp said his parents -- Edward, a janitor, and Arlene, a homemaker and later a school secretary -- searched the couch cushions each month for change to put toward the mortgage. It's a problem Shawn and I feel lucky not to have.
And Kopp reminisced about the way he and his family knew all the other families on the block so well that his parents never considered moving, despite the cramped quarters.
"The neighborhood, are you kidding? All the neighbors knew each other," Kopp said. "My parents were like, 'Why move? It's a great neighborhood.'"
Shawn and I have enjoyed meeting and slowly getting to know our closest neighbors. But a year into our new residence, we have yet to meet many others. We're told the bonding will happen most when our kids are school-aged.
When I relayed this exchange to Steven Meyers, director of the Initiative for Child and Family Studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago, he said it offered great examples of how families have evolved in the last several decades.
Parental roles and children's needs remain the same. Parents are still responsible for loving, teaching and being role models to their children. Children need affection, education and guidance, he said. This is why rituals -- from decorating the Christmas tree to filling a house with lilacs -- remain intact, as families continue to re-create happy moments we experienced when we were young.
At the same time, societal changes have made family lives notably different, Meyers added.
Many more women are in the workforce, influencing income and time spent at home. Divorce and remarriage are more common, leading to blended and more complicated family structures.
Meanwhile, technology -- computer games, online shopping, social media -- has led families to stay more isolated and less community oriented than ever before.
"Families don't rely on as many people as they have in the past," Meyers said. "And there's a greater sense of individualism in groups of parents."
Meyers said he often hears parents struggle with the differences between the past and today. Parents romanticize the past -- that children seemed more obedient and respectful -- without acknowledging the reality of now, where parents choose to be less authoritative, and society tolerates more pushback from younger generations.
He advises his clients that the best approach to reconciling the past and the present is to embrace the important aspects of previous generations that will give children a sense of who their family is. But also be mindful of the time in which we live.
"We can remember, we can reminisce, we can enjoy it. But we can't re-enter the house to re-create it, because somebody else is living there now," Meyers said.
Perhaps this is why, even after our second conversation, Kopp declined my offer for a tour of our place.
He said he was glad the rosebush -- which his dad tried to get rid of on numerous occasions, eventually becoming a family joke -- was still alive in the backyard.
He was happy to hear that I love to bake, since one of his fondest memories is of helping his mother prepare Thanksgiving pies in the kitchen.
But he said he got all he needed when he saw me, Shawn, Gracie and Maddie in the yard that day.
"It's nice to know that a family has moved in, that they're enjoying the house," he said. "After meeting you, I felt the house was in good hands."
Family on 07/15/2015