You can't go home again. At least, that's what they say and it's probably true. Recently I went on Google Earth and put in my old childhood home’s address and found, although it appears the house is still standing, the woods and fields that I grew up exploring and breathing and living with, have been clear-cut. Supplanting them are a few garish lodges, a swimming pool, and large open yards that cut up the place that I had once known as an unending forest, an extension in my mind of my own backyard. My home was ten miles from my hometown, which was a tourist location, so it's no surprise all this happened. There is always a particular kind of sadness, though, poignant nostalgia maybe, in seeing the place you lived in as a child dramatically change. It's a slight pain like no other, a reminder, a recognition, that the world isn't as static as you remember and want it to be. Time and the world move on, everywhere, with or without you. Somehow, this is never made clearer than when revisiting that home you knew from your childhood, and it's unrecognizably different, if it's even there at all.
My childhood home was perched on top of a hill that ended at a small stream a few feet from the road. It was a perfect hill for sledding in the winter. It was long and steep enough to be a fast ride, but short enough to make the walk back up not overly tiring. In the summer, the grass on the hill, as well as on the rest of our yard, was trimmed to perfection. There was never a blade of grass over two inches high. My dad worked for a state park situated right outside our town, and he kept the yard trim, immaculate even. Our house, a log cabin my dad built with his own hands, was two or three miles from a grocery store, and ten miles from town, like I mentioned earlier. Yet the house was set apart, and felt like it was deeper in the country than even that distance. Part of the reason for this feeling was that the town I grew up outside of, is itself tucked away off the beaten track and lounges in some of the most exquisite countryside I have ever seen anywhere in the world.
My road in particular was breathtaking. It was a dirt road during my childhood, though it's been paved over now. When I was a boy it was lined on both sides by overarching trees, whose branches met in the middle forming a natural arch you would drive beneath. My mom used to say it was so beautiful, especially in the fall when the leaves would turn to sunset red, and fiery orange, and morning yellow, that occasionally you would see painters with their easels on the side of the road, trying to catch even a minute share of its beauty.
That beauty lasted until one summer the local road construction crew clear-cut an entire side of the road to make it easier for them to plow the roads in the winter. Which was fair enough, but it was also one more instance where a frailer beauty lost out and was plowed under a more ruthless efficiency.
At the bottom of our hill there was a small stream that I spent hours every day, even in the winter, playing in and around, and exploring up and down as far as I could go, which was pretty far. My dad, at the behest of my mom, built a small, but beautifully crafted, varnished plank bridge, which can still be seen by Google Earth, to span the small stream, made expressly and exclusively for beauty. You could easily step over the stream, it was so small, but the little bridge made the crossing to get to the mailbox across the road, that much easier, and that much prettier.
Halfway down the hill were two massive maple trees. I've never seen bigger maples in my life. Two full grown people holding hands couldn't wrap their arms around and touch hands on the other side of either one of them. They must have been hundreds of years old, judging by their size. It was a pleasant thing to think of these behemoths as saplings around the time of the founding of our country; growing bigger and taller, far away from the action, as the country slowly developed.
The leaves from these trees were so plentiful in the fall, that they fell with the consistency and plentitude of the rain. When you stepped outside, it was always so quiet there, you could actually hear the slight sound of the soft sigh and rustle as the leaves fell and rested on the ground. If you walked underneath the maples and looked up, during this time, you would see the graceful dance and play of tiny flaming ballerinas performing their epic sweep against the backdrop of the sun and the sky.
The piles we raked were taller than us kids. My brother used to jump from different heights from the branches of the maples, into the piles, just to see how high he could jump in before they couldn't break his fall anymore. The piles were so mountainous, that as a seven or eight-year-old boy, I could dig under them, digging in by pushing the leaves behind myself, like a mole, until I reached the center of the mountain. Inevitably, by then, I would get lost in the surrounding uniform multitude, which in turn would kick start my claustrophobia, and I would jump up quickly, get my bearings, and then slowly wade my way back out again.
About thirty to forty feet from these leviathan maples were spruce trees planted like sentinels in a line, which blocked the view of our house from the road. The spruce trees were planted by my dad, another one of mom's projects. She has a passion and is a real genius, then as now, for transforming her surroundings for a practical purpose that ends up making those surroundings artfully beautiful, parts to a whole of an all-encompassing design.
This natural barrier, this tree-made fence, was nearly as tall as the maples by the time I was old enough to remember them, and they became part of my outdoor life as well. There was a small clearing in between the spruces too, that shaded and sheltered anyone underneath from the hot summer sun. There was also the added bonus of affording anyone who knew their secret of standing right next to the trunks, the ability to become invisible.
There were a hundred other intricacies around the place, each of which my dad had a hand in forging. There was a dam in the stream a little further up from the bridge, invisible from the road, that my dad helped me build, which made a small pool for the tadpoles to play in.
There were the mammoth hedges and vines that separated our property from the neighbor’s field at the side of our house that my mom thought to build a J shaped path through, much like a hedge maze. You could walk straight into the tail of the J from our backyard, walk across the side yard and then turn in the J shaped bend in the path that deposited you onto our front yard, without anyone seeing you walking the path. My dad made this thing happen first by hacking, then sculpting, and finally by raking and clearing. It was a tunnel made through vines, and when the vines ended, the trail continued between giant hedges which needed to be pruned back to make the path between the two properties.
He also put down a flat stone path that wound from our driveway, up the length of the side hill, ending at the side porch. He had a hand in making, as much as my mom had a mind in thinking up, the multitude of creative beautiful intricacies around the place that brought a very real enchantment to our yard.
My dad was the soul, the animating principle, of the home of my youth, but he died suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive coronary. Not on our property, but at our hometown gym, playing racquetball, a sport that he loved. And when he died, the place I had grown up in and loved, lost its soul and itself. We moved away a few months afterwards. My mom found and took a job in an entirely different state so she could support my brother and me, since we were both still teenagers in high school. Eventually she couldn't keep up with the upkeep of our old house, along with all the problems it took trying to rent it from a different state. So she ended up selling it and I didn't have another glimpse of it until many years later.
The last time I ever saw my childhood home in person was when I went to visit my sister, who still lives outside my old hometown. As I drove up our road, to see, one final time, the house I grew up in, a flood of memories assailed me, as it happens to everyone visiting their childhood home. The road, other than getting itself paved, hadn't changed a bit since I was a kid, which made the nostalgia run that much deeper. When I got to my house I parked my car and got out, just for a few minutes, at the bottom of our hill, close to the stream I used to splash in and keep cool in the summer, and where I used to look under all the rocks to see the many different kinds of strange aquatic critters hiding beneath.
I looked up at the house and noticed immediately that the trees, the huge old maples along with the entire line of the spruces, had all been chopped down. The logs of the cabin were whitened and brittle with age as old bones. The porch sagged in the middle. The log pillars that upheld the roof over the porch for so many years were likewise weather bleached and seemed to me to be tired of their positions. The grass was long, the length that happens right before it goes to seed. The whole place was foreign yet familiar, dead, while the memories in my mind still danced and cavorted, refusing to let my senses catch up with their capers.
I knew every inch of ground on that property. I knew the different smells of the different breezes in the different seasons. I knew the total accumulation of snow, and how long it took to melt in the spring. I knew what to expect to find under each of the rocks in the stream at my feet. I knew this place intimately. I had been homeschooled in that house, and when I wasn't studying or reading inside, which was most of the hours of my days, I was wondering and wandering and learning from this yard.
I knew all of that, and a hundred other useless, beautiful, haunting memories that transformed me on this plot of earth, but when I looked up at the house and beheld what it, and the lawn along with it, had all become, I no longer knew it. What I had remembered and what the place had turned into, were two very different things. The setting was the same but my memories made an impossible and unbearable overlay. I shook my head, got back into the car, and drove away, never to return again.
I don't know why, so many years later, I went back to look at it, on Google Earth of all things. I guess my curiosity to see the place I had once known so well, but this time from above, overpowered me. When I saw the woods behind my old house had likewise been transformed and ravaged to the usages of time, into a yard and pool of a lodge, I got the same sinking sense I had when I saw my home the last time.
All that remains of my childhood home now resides only in my memory and those of my family who once lived there. Once we pass on, that space will be gone forever. Yet, even though it’s in an entirely different state than my old home, my children now have a home of their own, a place to remember and make of what they will. And so the great wheel of time keeps turning, churning and renewing all that we are and once knew.