Going Home

Dads, remember that your children will one day feel this way:


You notice it more and more as time passes. You can't go home again. We try. When we leave the home of our youth for any significant time, it seems, upon our return, that everything changed overnight. This is nothing new. I've seen writers lament this very subject many times. Let's just say I need to write it myself, ok?


My sister and I just visited the family home. The house that's been in our family for at least 70 years, probably longer. Circumstances forced us to walk beside the house to the back yard. The fence on our left and the house on our right inexplicably stood drastically closer than when the two of us used to run around the house playing "red-light, green-light".


I know fences don't move, nor do houses, but some cosmic force narrowed that passageway so that we checked our steps so as to not get hung on the metal prongs of the fence.


Then there's the "dirt road" side of the house. While growing up with friends and a dog, grass rarely grew beside the house. Tonka earth-movers and dump trucks plowed the finely grained dirt and Match Box cars zoomed the new highways. Grass equaled invader and we often yanked roots as best we could so the offending foliage would be gone for life.


Now, the soft green carpet that blasphemes my eyes also amazes in that it actually looks appealing in a perverted kind of way. Its lushness invites my bare feet, something I would never do given their tenderfoot nature. Nature's carpet still appears as a toupee, an aberration, not the dirt construction zone of my youth.


Changes in the house, while disconcerting, do not possess quite the impact of the changes in exterior landscape. Trees, or actually the absence of trees, cause the most emotional trauma. We once corralled eight wonderful trees in our now-tiny-but-then-huge yard. Five Lomardi Poplars, a wonderful maple and two exquisite Chines Elms that bravely guarded the front of the house.


The Elms suffered death at the hands of the early seventies elms disease that eradicated this wonderful tree species. Those two trees commanded attention and shielded the small frame house from exposure of its limited size and plainness. The elms shaded the entire front lawn in summer and dripped luscious icicles in winter.


Now the house is exposed as a small box squished between two houses and is best described as nondescript despite some creative landscaping. This landscaping does lend the house a polished, tidy look, but without the elms, the house cannot live up to the standards of my youth.


I cannot at this time address the Lombardi's and the maple tree. I cried the day they cut down the rocket-shaped poplars. These soldiers stood guard over the back fence all the days of my early youth. The allowed grade-school aged friends to come over and look out over the entire town while breezes tugged at our clothes. We built forts that hid us in summer and protected us from the cold in winter. Now, their memory is as faded as forty-year-old blacktop.


Forty years since I last smelled those wonderful leaves. The autumn leaf piles taller than my parents that we once dove into with such glee now rotted into a plus green lawn that shows no wear and tear of dogs and children.


The changes devastate the heart. The longing for the days of army men battles and Tonka roadways threatens to overwhelm me - to send me into the abyss of sadness and melancholy. Work and responsibilities tug at my mind and tell me I can ill afford this emotional debilitation, but my heart longs for a tear, a healing drop of that part of me that needs closure and denies closure in one breath.


Going home often requires my heart to steel itself, to guard against the threat of emotional invasion, yet each and every trip, I fall prey to the ravages of time and I struggle not to weep over the loss of the vivid memories that fuel my melancholy. If I could only keep those memories sharp, at least I could wallow in the sadness to full effect. This thing of faded memories probably hurts most.


All that said, going home still touches my soul and too often in this world I get to feeling that my soul can no longer be reached. The sadness upon me now, I thank the writer's muse for the ability to touch that part of me no one ever sees...