Friday, August 15, 2014
They say you can't go home again.
And I didn't believe it until yesterday.
Over the years I always got back home on either Christmas or Thanksgiving. It's been over thirty years since I've been home in the summer and the whole thing seemed surreal.
It was like something out of the Twilight Zone.
The vegetation made roads I thought were big and wide into narrow, somewhat spooky lanes. It changed the whole outlook I had in my mind.
Thirty years is a long time and to any of you that return to your childhood homes after a long period should think carefully and realize that a lot of changes can take place in thirty years.
I found myself having to stop and be very careful after I almost went the wrong way down a one way street that used to be a two way back in the day.
Stop signs have appeared where there were none and a few lights popped up out of seemingly nowhere.
I was lucky to have a 10 year-old niece's daughter with me because she kept an eye open and was helpful.
I actually drove past my childhood home and had to back up because the vegetation almost hid it. The trees that were little had grown up and made the house look like it did back in '55 when we moved in. It is set back in the trees.
Over time a lot of the trees had died off and were replaced with saplings that have grown to climax over the past several years.
The house used to be grey but is now yellow. I did like it grey but the yellow isn't too bad.
The whole trip down memory lane after I visited the grave of my parents became surreal, kind of like the effects of a low powered psychedelic drug or something.
My trip to the old Coast Guard station was wierd and I sort of had my mental artificial horizon tumble a bit when I got spun around having to deal with a one way street situation that was a two way years ago. It threw me off.
My neighbor's house that was so big now looked a lot smaller than I remembered it.
The whole trip was kind of eerie and sort of weird.
A few things were still the same as I remembered them.
A few years ago I went looking for my grandparent's houses and they looked pretty much like they did back in the day. They were just as I had pictured them in my mind.
This trip was strange. There was no feeling of melencholy of a trip down memory lane. It was more of a strange trip through the twilight zone.
To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY
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I hear you, Mr. Pic. I probably get back to the home I grew up in more than you do, but I still run into the same things - streets and intersections and houses where there used to be woods. I even made a wrong turn and got lost a few years ago, in my own hometown. Felt like I was going senile.
ReplyDeleteI live quite close to my parents, to their delight. (Many visits with their first granddaughter!) But when I go to visit where my grandparents lived... That is another matter.
ReplyDeleteOne set of grandparents lived up in Maryland. Everything has become over developed there. So much so that we could not find my grandfather's grave site after my grandmother passed away. (Long, convoluted story.) We kept my grandmother's ashes... Until I found that someone had mapped my grandfather's grave on an internet website.
On the other side of my family, that set of grandparents lived in a rural area that is slowly dying off. Only a small handful of my family still live down there, probably less than five. Another of my great-aunts passed away recently, leaving the matriarchs down to three.
Time passes, the world changes.