The Ravages of Time

We visited my Dad recently. He lives about 250 or more miles away. He and my step mom, within the last year or so, moved into my grandparents' old house. My grandparents' house sits on some acreage in a small rural community on the Trinity River in southeast Texas. This community, this house and this property were the place that I spent many hours as a child and a youth. There are many fond memories associated with these places and very few unpleasant ones.

When I was born, I lived in this community. Upon my birth, we lived in a house in which my father had grown up. We lived there when my brother was born. About the time I was born, my grandparents had built a new house not far from this old one. This "new" house is the one in which my father and step mother now live.

Prior to my father's living here, my grandmother's house had been vacant for some 6 or 7 years. She, in her last years, had lived in an assisted living center, what we called an "old folks home." She had lived in this house alone for a number of years prior to this, as my grandfather had died in 1983. My contact with the old homestead(s) in the last quarter century has been occasional and sporadic, as most of those years I have been living quite a few miles away. With Dad's moving into Grandma's house, I have been given a new opportunity to visit the community of my youth. Things have changed.

The first house you see here is what we call the "old house." It is that house I lived in at birth. It is that house my father grew up in. Needless to say, no one lives here anymore, save an    occasional wild animal or two. This other house is my Aunt Maggie's old place. Aunt Maggie was my grandmother's sister and had been a widow from before my birth until her death. She was a fun-loving woman whom my brother and I loved very much. Memories of Aunt Maggie are filled with good times.

I spent some time wandering around these old places, talking with ghosts, and remembering these good old times. Very little about these places is as it was. Structures, with the exception of the property my Dad lives on, are in various states of falling down. Former residents have left this earth, never to return. Yet I remember. I remember walking this place, talking to those here before the ghosts moved in. I remember life being in what is now a dying husk. I remember an earlier day of vibrancy and potency that is long gone.

To stand in a place like this, I forget what has passed since then. Though my two sons sit off to the side, out of frame as I take pictures, I don't think of them. I don't remember my daughters, my wife. All I remember is me and here. All I remember is Aunt Maggie, Grandma and Grandpa. I remember Aunt Myrt, Grandma's other sister that lived across the street. I remember Lubie and Frances Nichols, Mr. and Mrs. Hudgins, and W. M. and Myra Hooper. I remember old Mrs. Roberts. I remember Uncle Bosie, my grandmother's batchelor brother. I remember hanging out at the railroad trestle over the Trinity. I remember mowing yards, working in gardens, and smoking corncob pipes full of cornsilks. I remember feeding the chickens and milking the cow. I remember climbing trees.

I put the lens cap back on my camera. The present floods to the fore. My sons sit there in the Mule, wondering what's going on with the old man.

I wander through a shed at my Dad's house and it begins again. I see a saw blade, hung on a rusty nail ages ago by my father's father. I see things that I know haven't been touched since he touched them. I find myself swishing back and forth in time. I wish my wife and children could have known him. I wish he could have known them. I wish I could hear him say, just once, how proud he is of me for doing such a good job with my family. I wish we could go squirrel hunting once again. I wish we could eat pears off his trees, juice running down our chins. I wish we could sit down and eat fresh corn on the cob and hot biscuits, smothered in butter than not long before was in a cow's bag.
 
I wish...I wish...