A Triptych of My Husband's Home Town (panel one)

Life has found a theme again...fitting the holiday it fell on: Memorial Day.

We spent the weekend camping in my husband's home town...a small rural community in Southern Illinois on the banks of what once was the Wabash River. But eventually a flood caused the river to move on, leaving the town behind. It is said that young rivers flow fast and straight. Old ones wind and wander, their swirling currents cutting deeper and deeper fingers into the landscape as they careen back and forth until nature finally cuts off a portion of that river channel to make a straight path for the river again, and an ox-bow lake is isolated and born. While maps show that there is still some mixing of waters between the river proper and the side eddy that touches Grayville, it is still as a whole remote from the faster moving water...the water that has a place to go and things to do.

I noticed the metaphoric nature of that water this weekend. It reflects the spirit of the town in many ways. In fact, much of my husband's and my musings over the time we spent there, camping on the edge of the park, sharing space with woodchucks and lizards, we considered the duality of life...both the dualities found in seeing different places at the same time and in seeing the same place at different times.

The morning we took the children to play at the park, a park their father played at himself years ago, I read the following quote in my devotional. It comes from "Objects in the Rear View Mirror" by Meatloaf. (One of those fellows I never considered to be so profound--what with his Rocky Horror Picture Show history and all--but still...

"If life is just a highway,
Then the soul is just a car,
And objects in the rear-view mirror
May appear closer than they are."

I liked the author's reflections on the quote. Gire describes this lyric thusly:
"No matter how fast we drive or how far away, we can never escape our past. Even though it is behind us, it is always in our rear-view mirror. And though it seems that the images of our past should grow smaller, the irony is that the farther down life's highway we travel, the closer they sometimes appear. Always just a glance away. And always glancing back at us. The images in that mirror may send us safely on our way, or they may send us crashing into a ditch. Such is the power of memories."

We immersed ourselves in the world revealed by my husband's rear view mirror the last three days. We visited old haunts...even sneaking into his old abandoned high school...but these will be things for describing in the other panels of the triptych. For now, I'll stop and simply think how honored I am that he finally mustered the courage to take us off the main river channel into the waters that didn't have anywhere in particular to go where we could find that lost place and lost time, where we could reflect on both the charm and the horror of the changes and the sameness in life...