by Lucky Garvin
I paid a visit five days ago. From ages ten through seventeen, my home was in Stephentown, a little hamlet founded in the heavily wooded mountains of New York State, southeast of Albany. The small towns to the north and south are located on the expansive level floor of an ancient valley. Those towns interrupt – but just barely – a thick quilting of hardwoods, not like the knitted, coniferred forests of Virginia. I doubt my home-place is on any map anywhere. It’s too small, tucked away like an after-thought in a narrow mountain recess.
I’m nearing where I once lived. I begin to feel a prickling on my neck. I pass the old federated church where once I sought grace without knowing I did so. Some of the old houses are gone; no new ones take their place. Soon I will pass a small bridge and enter what used to be the center of my childhood universe. Beneath that bridge will flow a small creek where I waded in rolled up pants, laughing and lost in hours pursuing elusive minnows. Ba-bump. I cross the bridge. The prickling is more insistent now as I enter this enchanted realm. As I drive along the unlined blacktop road, time seems to slow, stand quietly, and then begins a backward unfolding.
It is still beautiful here; a lush parliament of summer colors: shades of emerald, and lime, and yellow-green. The small clearing we used to walk on our way to the swimming hole is now grown up with trees of unbelievable size. Have I stayed away that long? The seven acres of lawn our family mowed every two weeks are now choked with weeds and crowded with trees elbowing each other out of the way for sunlight. Of the baseball diamond dad made for all the neighborhood kids, not even a board of the backstop remains in the tangled brush. I know. I looked.
Maples flank the lawn around the house, stout as a convent wall; leaf-covered sentinels in shaggy livery, three feet through at the base. As a child, I warmed to their protection and patronage. Their mighty limbs held off winter winds and bested furious storms. We tapped those trees for sap, and boiled it down in a large black pot big enough to sit in. Hours of boiling later, maple syrup. Those trees are here still; giants, but now with a stooping carriage. Three of them are gone, set upon by lightning or disease. Strange. I once thought them impervious.
The pond we dug long years ago is still there, now covered with algae and broad flats of silt. To my brothers and me, poling our clumsy rafts on those sun-bleached days, it was the Mississippi, and we were shortly-bound for Natchez. Now it lies neglected in a dense sketching of trees, new -grown since last I came. But I smile as I see that frogs still jump and panfish still kiss its surface. I stand at the edge of the pond and hear the long-ago voices fill in the silence around me.
Once there was a valley that led from the pond deep into the woods. How many times did I walk that path to cut firewood? That valley is now grown up with forest you’d swear had been there forever. But it hasn’t. Roaring Brook borders that valley; an exuberant little rock-strewn creek. When we moved there, its burbling chorus kept me awake. But what began as my annoyance became my lullaby. I listen to it in the afternoon stillness.
But what moved me most… the house; my home so long ago. As I stood in that a time-stilled air, the soft curl of memory collided with the moment. Transparencies flashed in front of me. Now. Then. Now. The old white house crowns the brow of a hill – neither so big as in memory – and bears the face of a weary king, dilapidated and solitary. I wonder if it recognizes me? Does it remember that it loved me well? Am I forgiven for having deserted it? Do homes miss people and long for their return? The house, ragged and peeling; the grounds, weed-choked and ill-tended; forgotten, unloved.
I feel so badly about that, but I know the uselessness of such regret. It seemed fitting to wonder if nature was taking back the land with its stealthy might, as if it had taken a sacred oath to rescind what is no longer wanted, and reclaim what once was incontestably its own. Will nature let you keep its gift if you work for it, if you value it? But if you ignore it, will the gift be revoked, slowly but inexorably, unless someone comes to love it again?
A melancholy shapes within me, mysterious but undeniable. My spirit is still here, I can feel it. Do I half-expect to catch a glimpse of my shadow-self? Does the little boy I used to be still roam these hills, and splash unseen in near-by willow-shaded creeks? Would he run from me the stranger; or pause at some haunting familiarity of my face. “Who are you?” “I am you.” Perhaps he would draw close in wonder and tentatively touch my now-silvered beard.
I walked about for an hour; no cars passed. Not one. My God, how did I ever endure this loneliness? Our solitary country road passes on for some miles before it rejoins highways. Perhaps it’s there the air begins to move, and time inches forward once again.
I guess my feelings are not such a mystery. You leave a place, and you travel far; some roads chosen, others not. You return home and find that nowhere are the miles better – and more relentlessly – recorded than from where you started. The house is old, I am old. But then, perspective tugs at my sleeve: we can’t go back, but we can go forward.
My life is now lit by other lives. I call another place “home.” Age sixty-five is too soon in life for summary, there is much of it yet to live.
They say you can’t go home again, and that’s true. But there’s another thought: it’s said when we achieve serenity, we won’t take anything for where we’ve been; that is, we see why events had to unfold the way they did. So maybe – just maybe – it’s worth traveling home, to go back and see if – but for nostalgia – we are at peace with our beginnings.
Look for Lucky’s books locally and on-line: The Oath of Hippocrates; The Cotillian; A Journey Long Delayed.