They say you can't go home again
it feels so trite until you try it
reaching down so deep it
cuts your very soul
We came home again last weekend
back to a fishbowl of places we don't remember
faces we barely recognize
holed up in a hotel in our own
hometown, the entire family of seven with spouses...
wishing.
Then a trip to the farm
our father's birthplace -
I remember from babyhood.
No one else did.
It seems we all have memories
seperate in age and growth
but feel the need to get back
to where we have those
first memories.
Mine are the oldest.
I felt discounted. Mine didn't matter.
I remember the smoke house, now gone.
I remember and regailed the youngest grandgirls
of the black snake skin hung over the cellar door...
the cows in the barn-the chickens in the coop where colored
Easter chicks found their home....later their demise for Sunday
Supper.
Had to catch myself when I became so overwhelmed with
memories I wept. Not a good thing on a happy occasion, but I'd not been back since my Grandfather died, and had only visited
in my dreams.
Look, there is the barn. I remember rowboating as a girl, not much
bigger than you, and catching fish in this river!
I remember corn as tall as grandpa! I remember tomatoes that filled
both hands. I remember running until your feet hit the chestnut hulls and
squeeling in pain...in pain!
I remember chestnut trees. I wonder if anyone else does.
No. You can't go home again. It's never the same.
Even if the Chestnut tree trunk is there, and the house has been re-roofed, and the windows have been changed.
The boxwoods are gone. The smoke house has been destroyed.
...Yet, as I looked out over the hill at the barn, I could drop to my knees and visualize it as a five year old and remember.
