Reverie

There is a place only old people can visit. You can ask them to go there for you, and you can revel in the way they describe what they're seeing as you watch them go there. But you can't go there with them, not when you're young. And best to ask one who is contented with life if you want to experience this phenomenon. Even as a child, I was fascinated with what I saw when old people transformed as they made this trip. Sometimes one would go alone, or sometimes two would go together. "Oh! Do you remember that--" and they would laugh together as they touched a place as elusive as Shangrila or Brigadoon. I never understood why, but I always knew it was a precious place, hallowed not so much by their words, the words in and of themselves meant little, a random little story, but their eyes and their tone of voice--these made the most mundane story special. Little things told me I was catching a glimmer not of a lost event, but of a lost world.

Now I, too, am getting older. And with age comes the initial loss of many things. Fear tries to play a larger part in what I venture and what I want. But there are new treasures, too. And this magic place is one of them. I am beginning to find certain landscapes awaken those things in me that I saw in the eyes of the old ones...for now, I still need a real-world trigger. It happened as we were coming home...off-road, driving through towns that are poor enough that time forgot to update the veneer on them. So I recorded each and every thing that made me feel like I was in that special place, that place of a world going lost everywhere but in the magic of my memories. These things have already migrated there in most places, but not in this one precious little town:
farm co-ops
front porches with wrought iron posts
hydrangea bushes
sun-bleached water towers bragging about the local mascot
metal burn barrels, smoking (were they ever anything but rusty?)
bathtub Madonnas
Queen Anne's lace growing at will
white washed tractor tires serving as everything from garden borders to playground equipment
neighbors chatting familiarly (How can you be a stranger to someone whose underwear you've seen through your kitchen window, underwear flapping in the breeze on the clothes line?)
aluminum pie tins in gardens
propane tanks behind the clothesline of underwear in the back yard
corrugated roofing-tin or plastic, no matter
roads dappled by sun and shade, or for a rare treat, trees that canopy across the whole road
rows of tall, cement block walls: the ancient ruins of a car wash (they were the same ancient ruins 20 years ago, too)
and
the community ditch, and as each driveway went across the culvert, the unique side of each family was displayed as they used everything from wagon wheels to magic-wand styled reflectors stuck in the ground on either side of the drive.

"I thought of home...and long ago...We sang the old songs...and many an eye was misty...
Memories...they come surging back into the heart to make it clean again...or to accuse it." from Peter Marshall's sermon "The Rock that Moved."

May the memories of everyone I love age well.