07.12.07
When You Can’t Go Home Again
Occasionally, when I am in a nostalgic mood, and we are in the area, we ride past the farm where I grew up and where my mother continued to live, until she could live there no longer. Now, in the field where I once rode my horses, there is an elaborate mini-mansion with a four car garage. In the house where I once lived, another family resides.
The barns where I kept Bantam chickens, a rabbit, and my horses, and sometimes a few heifers, have been completely torn down. I have memories of tossing and stacking 100 lb. bales of hay into the hayloft, summers, when I barely weighed that myself. Now, that IS a distant memory.
While I was in Jr. High, I held hands with my boyfriend, in same hayloft, both of us way too shy to do anything but that. I remember my big brother, being nervous about the “situation” as if it were a federal crime to hold hands, and shooing my would-be suitor home. As I recall, he never came back.
A vivid recollection are the berries on the farm, among them the high bush blueberries that grew along a stonewall. If I collected enough of them, Mum would make blueberry muffins. Blackberry bushes grew wild along same stone wall, and she would make a pie, all the while complaining about the large seeds in the berries. I remember the low-growing, wild strawberry plants that produced the sweetest berries known to man. I recall the huge “tire” that I stepped on while picking those berries. It turned out to be a six foot long, black snake that slithered off into the field, in search of field mice.
Summer days were carefree…mostly…until the day that my parents were both at work in the city, and my brother threw a bomb down a woodchuck hole, and that started a fire. In my mind’s eye, I can see the local firetrucks skittering across the field to the other side of it, but being able to quickly dowse the fire. I believed I called them on the phone in our country kitchen.
Early in the morning, my brother and I would get up to go watch the deer that would gather, “just over the knoll,” lending new meaning to the name of the town, “Deerfield.”
After I was married to Jim, my mother often would call and say that she had baked or cooked something luscious, such as her Chicken Casserole or an Apple Pie, or a cake, and she’d invite us down. She was a very good cook and baker, so it was hard to refuse.
It’s funny how the mind works. No matter what situation we find ourselves in, bad or good, we think that it will last forever. Perhaps we don’t realize that the bad times could end, as well as the good times. We prefer not to think about our days being numbered, but they are, whether or not we acknowledge the fact.
My mother’s problems, that led to her eventual demise, began early one morning with a stranger’s voice, (an EMT) calling me on the phone to say that she had experienced a heart attack. She was taken to the hospital, and was in and out of other hospitals and nursing facilities until she finally died several years ago. She never had the chance to go “home again.” The undone dishes and laundry, the housecleaning that needed care, the unpaid bills, and all of her worldly concerns were left to others to administer.
Today, I am thinking about people whose homes have been blown away in tornadoes, or washed out to sea, or lost in a fire. Those people cannot go home, any more than I can. You see them on television, sifting through rubble, trying to recover a photo or some momento from the past, something, anything that is representative of their past lives.
The fact of the matter is that none of us can “go home again” when our loved ones are no longer there, even when the physical structure is, indeed, in place. Home is wherever we are surrounded by love. “Home is where we hang our hat,” as they say. Sometimes, the love we have experienced in LIFE can only be re-visited, in memory.
Patricia Cummings
