I walked around the neighborhood after work today. The village is old, all but a few of the homes a hundred years old or more, trees covering my shadow that had existed long before I did. It's a quiet place, a safe area to walk, as I pass a Pub, the Catholic Church, down past the school to my house. A flock of Canadian geese fly overhead, causing me to look up to a gunmetal sky as I turn up my sidewalk.
The wooden steps lists ever so slightly, as if tired, a project when the kitchen is done. The rest of the structure is solid, the roof of the porch hovering without sound over invisible memories. Several generations have lived in this home, all leaving their mark on it.
I wonder if I could instantly take myself to this spot 50 years in the future, if it would be the same, if it would even be here. That's something I will never likely know, as the future, like beauty itself, floats fleeting, undefined, half hidden in the silent, still air, to be recognized only when we are ready.
I step inside and take my boots off, gliding quietly over polished floors, throwing my coat on the fragmentary curve of the chair. The house empty, I go down to the basement, ducking my head in stooped courtesy to the low ceiling, where I will take up a tool and hammer grief into a piece of wood.
They say you can't go home again, and perhaps as far as a childhood home, that is true. But what of the memories of other places we hold firm in our mind's eye. Some of them we have a name for, our elementary school, the river where we dove as far out as we could into the dark water, the place where church bells rang. In the Book of Genesis, all is drawn out of fluid chaos by its name, "God called the dry land Earth". Sometimes, the incredibly complex can be summed up in one word. Some things have no words at all, their form remembered only in the etchings of tears.
But of those places, both named and unnamed, there are places you are drawn back to, years later, praying they are not changed, and knowing it will not be so.
For those are the time when what I remembered is simply gone. My Aunts house, where I sat in the tiny living room and listened to my favorite Uncle, the Engineer, ask questions that made me view the world in a whole new way. It's gone, the house raised to joint the tall colorful homes that rise towards the sky on those small lots. All that is left is some glassware of my Aunts, my Uncle's engineering books, passed to my brother, then carefully traveling home with me this week, to take up their vigil on my own desk. There in the closet is the carefully tended uniform of a great War, the cloth itself assuming the shape and form of those who are our heroes, looming tremendous against that backdrop of books and tools, and a small folded flag, that fills a sleeping house.
There in a city further away is a rental house I lived in as I started University. I shared the top floor apartment with two girl friends from high school, the main floor housing one of their brothers and a roommate, as did the basement. It was owned by one of my friends parents, We got cheap rent, but it was NOT free, the house having to pay for itself. It was so very tiny, two of us sharing one bedroom, one former bedroom, now the "living room", the really small one, mine, just enough room for a twin mattress on the floor and some pictures of musical instruments on the wall. In the tiny bathroom, a single antique claw footed tub, as deep as desire. It was a sanctuary where I would soak for an hour with Vivaldi playing, not the usual Queen or Led Zeppelin, when I actually had the place all to myself.
It was a big city, but we felt safe, we had each other and A's brothers close by. We also had a tape recording of big dogs barking that we'd play anytime someone knocked on the door at the bottom of our stairwell to the downstairs outside door, with a loud "Down Killer! Down!" We felt safe but we weren't naive, the stories of Ted Bundy still abounding in these neighborhoods, the glint of fear still in many young women's eyes, a primordial fear as sharp as a knife.
So many places, now gone, or changed to where what I remember of them is more recalling a piece of music I've heard, but for which I played no part.
When I was in grade school , on the long walk home, there was this giant shrub, actually several that had grown together, dying parts replaced by new shoots, all trimmed in a huge square shape. But underneath, in the tangle of their bases, you could crawl through, on your belly, like you were in some sort of secret fox hole tunnel. There were lots of open branches and space so it wasn't EXACTLY like a foxhole, but we could pretend. Of course I'd arrive home, the dress my Mom had made for me all dirty and she had NO idea how I could get that way from a "walk home".
So imagine my surprise when I was first back in town after university and saw that sculptured shrub was still there, all new pieces perhaps, but still a growing living thing. I could no longer fit underneath its form but I could see that image still, looking up through the dense shrubbery, the branches, the arms that protect, the leaves, guarding not just my form but my urgent heart as I thought that surely heaven must be this color green, that forever grows and will never die.
I think of the walls of my crash pad near work, a place that is only a spot to lay my head when I'm on duty, my true home far away. But what of the memories made there, the dinners and laughter, Barkley's attempts to get the little plush Wookie off of Tam's purse, friends stopping by to see both of us, innumerable waffles, toast and toasts and always, books. There were tools and brass and puzzles and a question asked that made me look at the world in a whole new way. There is a dog bed, by mine, that now stands alone, guarding something that remains.
Then there are the nights alone there, waiting for the phone to go off, even as it doesn't. My eye lids twitch as I try to sleep, the movement in response to my own brains thoughts or perhaps merely the cyclical movement of the earth and all of her watchers. In this place, there were memories made, and a life, perhaps forever changed. I wonder if years from now, I will drive past, just to see if it's here.
For these are the places of our happiest memories. They are scraps of time, like scraps of a note where your name once lay, a bit of stiff paper that mean little of itself, yet still you keep it, will not burn it or throw it away because it means something, something you can hold even if the marks upon it are faded to white, something that says what you were, what you felt, even as you still are.
Years from now, oh so many years you hope, year to dream, to grow, there will come another night, with eyes that twitch with the minds flooding, even if the body is failing, the organs requiring the care of a Swiss watch even as time ticks down. The eyes are full of everything save consciousness and others gather around, looking on with knowing and unbearable eyes. The places of your memory are likely long gone, all they have here is the pictures of them in that brain that still sparks like a match, unspoken stories mirrored in the eyes of those around you.
Those places are never truly lost, they simply lie in whatever peaceful trail, beside whatever placid and assuring pond of spent years remains; in the mirror of days in which the mind still contemplates older desires and everlasting hopes. They are there, always, quiet, musing, steadfast, the joy still triumphant even if the actual place is now cinder and dirt. In that brain, is one final vision, a place perhaps, a person, someone for whom that spark exists even if they were years gone. The breath slows, the body remembers, the eyes finally close even as they embrace all seeing.
From outside the basement window, the cry of a solitary Canadian Goose, soon joined by another, and another. Their sounds rise towards an astonishing crescendo, beyond the compass of hearing, as they fly upwards into a bright green sky.
- Brigid
