Rockwall, Texas; Rockwall, Texas

The banner headline across the top of the real estate section of the Dallas Morning News proclaimed:  “Rockwall/Heath known as one of Dallas’ ‘best-kept secrets”. 

Let’s ignore how something that is ‘known’ can not be a secret. .  The article turns out to be a puff piece for a real estate developer promoting his project where “The residents of Rockwall and Heath love living lakeside and the relaxing lifestyle that is offered only 20 to 25 minutes outside of Dallas’ hustle and bustle.”

I was surprised to read that Rockwall County, “the third wealthiest county in Texas”, is also one of the fastest growing areas in the state and country,    Quite a contrast from the 1930's when Mother and my grandmother took me from Fort Worth to Rockwall to visit my grandmother’s sister, “Aunt Lou”.  As a child I was bored, as wedged in the back seat between my cousins, the car drove slowly on the two-lane highway through the little towns of Arlington and Grand Prairie.  We crossed Dallas on city streets, then saw cotton fields on both sides of the road. 

My grandmother, whom we called “Nonna”, would wave an arm to a hillside on the right and say, “That’s Rowlett over there.”  The “town” consisted of three or four buildings.  The surrounding farms were reputed to be one of the few predominately Catholic communities in North Texas.  It was taken for granted that most people were Baptists. 

The old center of Garland, where I first lived when I returned to Texas in 2006, was not even on the highway.  There was a gasoline filling station and a hamburger stand where we sometimes stopped on the way home. 

Today those towns, each with over 100,000 people, are welded together in one vast urban complex.  Bordered on both sides of the six-lane road are fast food restaurants and shopping malls.  There is nothing to indicate the city limits between towns. 

As a child, I seem to remember a single traffic light on the highway at Arlington.  Off to the left was a race track standing derelict after the Texas legislature banned gambling.  Today the state permits betting on horses, the ponies race at a track in Grand Prairie.  Crossing Dallas County are two interstate highways, I30 and I-20.  Traffic is horrible, especially bad on I30 at Arlington, site of Six Flags Over Texas with its giant rollercosters, and also that monstrous stadium where the Dallas Cowboys bash other teams in football.

Rockwall has not caught up.  The Dallas Morning News says the “fastest growing area in the country” consists of the “city” of Rockwall with 40,000 people, while Heath, “a bedroom community of Rockwall”, has 8,000 residents. 

Those lakeside lots which the realtor is promoting are on Lake Ray Hubbard, which was not there when I was a child. We would come down off a little hill into a valley where the Trinity River flowed sluggishly.  Beyond was a high hill on which we could barely make out the dome of the old court house. 

“There’s Rockwall,” said my grandmother. 
“Where’s Aunt Lou?” I asked.
“Don’t you see her?” said my precocious cousin Pat.  “She’s standing on the front porch waving her apron at us.” 

I knew she was teasing me.  My cousins always treated me as if I were slightly retarded.  But why do I remember that particular remark? 

Today Pat is an old lady, 97 years old, living in a retirement home in South Dakota.  We talk on the phone now and then.  Our attitudes towards each other have changed.

When I was a child, the trip from Fort Worth to Rockwall took all day.  We always stayed for several days with Aunt Lou and Uncle Lon in their little Victorian house a few blocks from the court house. 

After grandmother died, we took her back from Fort Worth to Rockwall on Interstate 20.  The trip from Fort Worth to the old cemetery in Rockwall cemetery on I20 took less than an hour. 

We buried Nonna next to her husband, Lyle McDonald.  He died in the 1918 flu epidemic.  She had been a widow for more than 60 years.  Nearby are the graves of were her parents,  “Grandpa” and “Grandma” Wade.  (I did not know them by any other names.)  In the same plot are my grandfather’s parents and also three little graves of my grandmother’s little brothers, who all died in infancy before she was born – mute testimony to those days when infant mortality was frequent.  Many things have changed, but my roots grow deep in Rockwall, Texas.