The Grand Rapids Press

As commercial development makes its way north along Alpine Avenue, only a few Alpine Township homes still stand. This time next year, the house where Cecilia Schafer and her late husband, Lawrence, raised 12 children will be demolished to make way for a carpet store.

"It's hard, said Schafer, 75. "But I have no regrets about living here. They were happy years."

For now, Schafer lives amid boxes on the first floor of the two-story home her husband made the down payment on just one day before their wedding in 1947.

"I think he was trying to make sure I would go through with it," she recalled, laughing. "We were going to live out our lives here. But times change."

Now the retired homemaker spends her days tying up the loose ends of a long life in their former home in the country.

"I try to pack a little every day, a closet or a cabinet at a time," she said. "You accumulate quite a bit being in one place for so long."

Photographs and memories have all been packed away. Above a living room archway, only the shadows remain of a long line of her children's photos, taken when they were one year old.

In the front bedroom on the second floor, where her five sons grew up in three sets of bunk beds, the make-shift closet their father built is still marked off with the masking tape that designated how much room each one was allowed.

Two graduated from West Catholic High School, the other 10 from Kenowa Hills. One went into the military and now flies airplanes. Eight still live in town.

"It's very hard," Schafer said. "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think I hear the children."

In the 52 years she has lived at 4677 Alpine Ave., she has seen her front yard transformed from a rural country road into a state highway. Her children used to hold hands as they made their way to a baseball field across the street.

Changes along Alpine Avenue also are bittersweet for Township Supervisor Sharon Steffens, whose own children knew the Schafer kids growing up.

"It can never stay the same," she said. "Turning a road into a state highway has tremendous impact on any community. But (Alpine Avenue) is where our growth belongs."

Schafer's property was rezoned from residential to commercial about five years ago, she said. But she knew she would have to leave long before that, when Greenridge Country Club in Walker was sold to make way for what now is the Greenridge Square shopping center.

"I used to have a huge front yard," she said. "Seems every year they took more and more of it to widen the road."

The back yard still shows evidence of rural living. A barn where Lawrence stored his tractor still stands, though a garage door was installed about 10 years ago. Next to it, her children's sandbox has been overtaken by weeds.

On the north end of the property sits the 12-foot picnic table that used to be in the family's kitchen.

"It's the only way we could all sit down together," Schafer said. "We both wanted a big family. When we bought the house, everyone said it was too big, but we filled it right up."

They ate vegetables and raspberries grown in the backyard garden. During the winters, she said, there would sometimes be as many as 500 canning jars of food stored in the basement.

The children gathered at the home one last time Wednesday (12-1), to mark Schafer's 75th birthday. They plan to attend mass as a family again Sunday at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, then present their mother with an aerial photograph of the property as a memento.

"It will be sad," she said. "Whenever they come home they walk around outside, like they're trying to take a mental picture of what life was."

On the day it is to be demolished, Schafer plans to watch as bulldozers reduce the family home to rubble.

Her children don't want her to be there to see it torn down, "but I want to be here," she said.

Parts of the house will live on in her children's homes. One son will take some of the oak floors for an addition to his home. A daughter wants the glass doorknobs.

And like other former Alpine Avenue residents, Schafer has found another place to go. She will live with one of her daughters and her family in Grand Rapids, taking with her whatever she has room for.

"It will be quiet there," she said. "No squeaking brakes, no traffic. Life goes on."