It's a long way from my mountain to the bodegas and roadside seafood stands of my youth. And it used to be rural, dirt roads, farms and not another house in sight. Now, the old homeplace is surrounded by McMansions on 5 acre lots.
You can go home again, but it's never the same...
(I built that barn with my dad in 1970 from lumber scavenged from an old house we torn down in another county. All the pine trees were dug up in the woods and planted in the yard that same year...)
At the end of the road...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I discovered recently the block of flats in which I was born (in a small bedroom on the third floor) has been razed. Just a leveled expanse of grass now. No traces of the lives and loves and tangled webs of history that once resided there (especially the first seven years of my life!). Left me quite melancholy. Would definitely have gone there and videoed its destruction, had I known. I remember going back there in my 30s and discovering the veranda overhang under which I remembered standing and pushing my head up against as a child on my tiptoes. Extraordinary to see, all those years later as a man, that the overhang came up to just below my waist and I could suddenly visualize myself the less-than-three-foot child again, so small and ghost-like. The memory was there, most solid. And here at last was definitive proof of my once size and being. It was not just a dream. Or was it?
And my old school, too. Recently gone beneath new housing without a whiff of historical record (or rather, non that marks the spot, so to speak - but perhaps that's a good thing!). Was I really there? Did all those things happen? I'm sure they did. I certainly hear the echoes. Dreamlike we shuffle the older we get, remembering, remembering...
I'm so very impressed by that barn. That it was built all those years ago from reclaimed wood. That you built it with your father. And that it is still standing! Beautiful story and gorgeous images.
Great images poignant words.
Post a Comment