SMALL TOWN GIRL TO CALIFORNIA GIRL & BACK: HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
I discovered that it’s true: you CAN go home again.
All it takes is a home — a place of belonging, of the soul’s peace, of long ago that managed to keep just a whiff of itself. Maybe a bit of landscape, a water’s edge, an old house or two, a gnarled oak. And if you’re lucky, one friend who anchors the past. I can recommend my friend Carlene.
Going home again is a matter of recapturing some elusive, indelible memory etched into your soul: what it was, why it came to be yours, how it shaped you. If past is prologue, exploring the past is a fascinating chapter in the book of aging.
For most of us humanoids, once we hit the half-century mark — a mark I passed almost that many years ago 😱 — there’s a mysterious, built-in yearning to go home again. Going there can be painful while still and often useful. Or it can be enlightening, uncovering skeletons you never knew existed. Or uplifting. Or startling, or bewildering, soul-strengthening, enriching . . .
Or it can be, as in my case, pure joy. Admittedly, mixed with a smidge of most of the above.
I’m particularly lucky to be able to start a homecoming with a visit to The Father — a statue of my dad on the campus of Randolph-Macon College in beautiful downtown Ashland VA. The last thing any college needs! But in this case one determined student launched a memorial campaign some years back which resulted in The Father. A daughter sure can’t argue.
But you don’t need a memorial. Going home again is better when you conjure up that memory out of something more abstract. The shape of a fallen leaf that came from the same tree you climbed as a child. The smell of sawdust from an old feed store or factory or abandoned house. The images cast by shadows on a sidewalk that your mind can miraculously shift back to images of long-gone neighbors, buildings and picket fences that the sunlight of decades past imprinted on that site.
Carlene and I spent a lot of time driving around, pointing out homes that, in my mind, are still inhabited by the neighbors of my childhood. Those neighbors are still in my psyche.
Like the old Cox house on College Avenue that backed up to ours. It was Walter Cox who ratted us out when my sister Mimi and I, aided and abetted by our friend Beverly Ann, set out to go around the roof by inching along the gutters. It’s a three-story house with a slate roof. I would like to claim having had that sort of adventurous bravery at age 6; actually I just couldn’t be left behind by Mimi and Beverly Ann.
Before we plunged to certain death, though, Walter spotted us, alerted his mother, who called our mother, who came out into the back yard, called upward in a voice calmer than I can today even imagine, “Dahlings . . . you really mustn’t do that. Just back up to where you started and climb back into the dormer window . . .” Which I can now admit I was happy to do; having been the last one onto the gutters I was the first one back in the window.
My mother, accustomed to her daughters forever climbing trees, explained to us about height limits, thin gutter wires and slate roofs. We went on to other adventures, but we never forgave Walter Cox.
Carlene and I even revisited the old swimming hole at Horseshoe Bend. Before there were community pools there were swimming holes:
Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash
Usually these were bends or eddies of rivers into which kids could jump from bridges or tree limbs in endless acts of derring-do. In my memory the river at Horseshoe Bend is wide and deep, the water sparkling, the bridge (still today a narrow two-lane) and overhanging tree limbs daringly high. So it’s a muddy creek bounded by a shrub or two? Going home again means scratching the surface of reality to recreate images of the past. Even when those images prove, ahem, altered over the years.
Carlene’s memory of the old Blair house produced a story I had never known. It involved a surreptitious multiple-girl spend-the-night party in the midst of which a late-night decision was made to sneak out in search of adventure. Possibly involving a similar party of multiple boys that was going on just outside of town.
So as not to wake Mrs. Blair, some of the girls crept out the back door, pushed someone’s family Buick a few blocks — also to avoid waking Mrs. Blair when the noisy engine cranked up — and set out. As the adventure developed, a few of the girls returned to the house to get the ones left behind (in those pre-seatbelt days you could pile a lot of girls into those cars, but not all 10 or 12 at once.) On arrival the returnees were met by the lady of the house standing in the doorway proclaiming them all hopeless Bad Girls, threatening to call the sheriff, their parents . . . it was not a happy scene. But somehow, eventually they prevailed upon the hostess not to call the cops. Or worse, their parents.
The reason I had never heard this tale, over all these decades?
“We absolutely swore each other to secrecy forever,” Carlene reported. “If just one parent had learned of our escapade, word would have quickly spread and we would all have been confined to our rooms for years.” But on this Going-Home-Again visit she decided that since most of the partiers and all of the parents involved are now dead – – perhaps it was safe to tell the story.
It helps, if you’re going home again, for Home to have been a railroad town. Trains, before diesel engines made them less interesting and airplanes made them less necessary — for passenger travel at least — are at the heart of memory for generations of us.
Photo by David Herron on Unsplash
Trains connected us to glamorous people and places, serving as a constant reminder of the wide world. Where the old tracks remain they hold those memories: of flattening pennies and bobby pins on the tracks, of racing along the ties or balancing on the rails.
Trains or trees, roads or rivers, old haunts or old houses, any or all can take us home again.
Or maybe Home is just those collected memories, deep in the heart.
