Move

I have moved only five times in my life. I moved to Tokai-mura when I was temporarily transfered for two years at the age of 30, where I met a girl and got married^^. On the marriage, I moved from a small, damp company dormitory room to a new, spacious company apartment with my wife to start up our new lives.
The third move was from there to an old, small, almost "dilapidated" apartment when we got back to Tokyo right after my transfer period ended.
Yesterday my wife and I happened to drive past the familiar intersection, one of the road of which led to the old apartment. I steered to the right to the road and drove to where the apartment should be.
The town changed a lot with the elapse of 25 years since we left the town to moved to my parent's house (which now is being tore down for rebuilding).
At first we could not find where, but gradually we remembered some old landmarks--- a super market and elementary school--- and got to identify the place where it had been located. It had been... What we saw instead was just a vast open lot of land. We were sure that it was the place where we had lived for two years. We walked around the vast empty lot to find any evidence that shows it really stood there. We at last found a name plate left on a gate post, on which exactly the name of our apartment was written. We stood there for a while and reminisced how small the apartment was. It had only 2 rooms (6 tatami-mat and 4.5 tatami-mat size respectively) with a 1.5 tatami-mat size kitchen and a tiny bath room and toilet. We remembered how the rusty iron window panes rattled when we tried to open them, how cold the winter was because of the drafty windows, how we managed to place furniture while finding out a space to put our futon in, how our first baby's bed took up the space.... That was a gift from my parents who had no idea where we were going to live. We had no option but to use it in that extremely small room.
Surprisingly a family on the 2nd floor (right under us) lived in exactly the same size apartment house with two high school girls and even had an upright piano. We suspected they were using some kind of magic to produce a new space from nothing or send their daughters to 4th dimension world to fit them all in the apartment.
Since the apartment complex was gone, now the town looked deserted. The supermarket where my wife used to go buy everyday things was deadly quiet as if to forget about the hustle-bustle of crowds of house-wives. When we moved there, my wife thought that aprons were uniform for house wives to go shopping because everyone wore an apron. Perhaps they were too busy to take off their apron to go out. But now aprons were gone together with the energy of the town. This way, something is born, grows, gets old and dies. Towns are no exception. It just got old. I wonder if the time will come when the air of the town rings with people's babble, murmur, chat, din and noise ever again. It may. It may not. That's the way the world goes.