Lake Braddock

It was a fateful day in September 1995. I had just finished my dissertation at UCLA (though I wouldn’t officially graduate until December) and I had obtained a postdoctoral fellowship at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC. I flew out to look for a place to live in advance of our arriving October 1. My good friends Bill and Kim Amatucci put me up for a couple of days, though Kim was in the throes of her last trimester of her pregnancy with Nick. I didn’t see much of her. Now that I think of it, I might not have seen her at all!

Jennifer, a realtor, drove me around all day looking at houses to rent. At the end of the day, we visited 9637 Westport Lane in Burke, VA. The house was nothing special, and in fact the family was in the process of moving out, so it was a mess. However, it had the requisite 3 bedrooms (one for me and Kathy, one for Katie and Megan, and one extra - Sarah had not yet arrived), and was fine. I hadn’t yet found the place. But it was near sunset, so when we left the house, I walked on a path up a small hill, and found myself on the top of a dam, looking out over a lake. This is what I saw.

I knew instantly that this was the place. One of the things I knew I was going to miss was living near the ocean, which I had done all my life up until that point. A lake is not an ocean, but at least it’s water, and this was an especially nice lake. We loved it so much that two years later we bought a house a block away, and ultimately spent 6 years in Lake Braddock until we moved to Ormond Beach in 2001. But that’s a tale for another post….