A Time And Place That Does Not Exist Anymore

 

(Note:  Possibly AI generated.)\

One of the unusual advantages afforded me by going to Old Home so often over the past 5.5 years that I regularly drive through my old home town and, upon occasion, go up my old street.

I grew up in the same house for my entire life.  The street - a small one with maybe twenty houses back then with a dead end - was a sort of community.  For years - probably until early high school - owners did not change very often and thus we knew everyone that lived there.  Some of my grade school and high school classmates lived on the street.  Even today, there are a few families there from that period of time.

When I was in what is now the equivalent of middle school (6th - 8th grade), one of my best friends moved up just up the hill from my house.  To get to his house, I could have walked all the way down the street and around and up the hill with their drive way - or, I could (and did) walk up the gravel road next to our house, cut through the property next door, go under two fences, and just arrive.  It was the same with my other school friends who were farther away but within walking distance - in fact, walking the fields and forests that were between myself and them was far safer than trying to walk the roads that led to their houses.

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I could take you back there now.  The street is still there, although it no longer dead-ends but runs into the previous pasture next to it which itself has become built over with houses.  At least two of our original neighbors live there; the rest of the homes have turned over in the intervening years, including the one I grew up in - which is now worth 7.5 times the amount my parents paid for it.

The pastures and woods and paths I walked are now more built up or fenced off.  I could, if I wanted to, get to the back woods where most of my 7th and 8th grade years were spent running through trees and building forts - but somehow a man in his 50's on private property is a little more of a concern than a boy of 12.

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That sort of nostalgia clouds my entire view of that time of course.  It is fair to say that life was "simpler" back then - but then again, I was a child and then a teenager in a middle class household where we went to church every Sunday and had breakfast and dinner together almost every night.  Part of my extended family were near.  The great "issues" I faced in life seem almost ridiculous by today's standards, a combination of unrequited love and role playing games and music and drama and the sorts of things that seem so far away both from my life now - but also from the lives of my children when they were that age.

The world, in the intervening years, became far more complex and complicated.

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Am I homesick for a time and place I can never return to?

In one sense, no.  Heraclitus' admonition that we can never step into the same river twice remains as true as it ever was.  Even when I go back to visit now, it is not the same.  Even if I relocated there, the people are gone, the world has become much older and sadder, and I am have grown older as well, with the wear and cares and scars that life as an adult brings.

And yet, in another sense, yes.

As much as it is impossible to recreate, there is a part of me that wants that simpler life - not from the sense of re-creating it (that can never happen) as much from a sense of enjoying the same feeling from it.  There was a certain sense of place and being surrounded by those that I did life with, my school friends and family that has been extracted over years of moving to a series of destinations that were home, but only for a while (as it turns out) and a series of people that I associated with (and they with me) that was driven as much by proximity as by mutual interests.

That - that sense of place and people and, in a real sense, purpose - seems lost in a way that it is unlikely to return.