Walking backwards

For Linda, who wondered where the photos had gone.

I just came back from the place that I grew up in. Josh Ritter had put a call out for photos of everyone's hometowns for some project he's working on and I figured I'd go see if I could find any good angles in mine. But I don't think I even found my town. Most of what I remember is long gone and there are almost as many blank spaces in my memory as there are on Elm Street.

I roamed aimlessly past the places where The Farmer's Daughter bakery was (I had a crush on a boy who worked there once, though I no longer remember who it was), where I had watched them tear down an old theater across the street from my dance studio, where we bought cars, where we bought groceries, where I bought penny candy (they sold both gummy worms and real worms there) and where I had walked up to the drive up window and ordered an ice cream cone. Most of those buildings no longer exist.

Where I bought party favors is now an apartment building and my friend's brother lives there.

Where we stumbled through the kid-sized trees playing tag behind my old house, and where I earned the scar on my left palm thanks to an unfortunate meeting with a piece of glass, there are no reminders.

I do think I found where we waded through muddy water and startled a catfish, but pretty much every other image in my mind resides only there. I still thank/blame Neil Gaiman and The Ocean at the End of the Lane for encouraging me to question childhood memories, but it's easy to doubt yourself when the physical evidence is gone.

I did find the house that gave out caramel popcorn balls at Halloween (remember those days?) and confirmed it with a friend that had been there with me back then. It's even more of an Addam's Family house than I remember.

Being a visitor, I felt free to wander off the paved paths. This railroad bridge near my house was always a temptation, though I might have waited for a less gusty day to cross those beams.

Someday it's going to be part of a bike path (yay, for progress!), but in my mind it will always be the bridge that some kid from my kindergarten class fell off of when he was fishing with his dad. I still don't know if that really happened and probably never will.

I actually walked quite a few miles of bike path and found myself wishing we'd had it when I was around. On a strangely warm, fall day, it's quite pleasant and everyone on it was super-friendly (no Rocky Mountain pathletes here!). I wandered off the path a few times, too, out of habit.

I did notice a startlingly large number of starlings in the area. While I know that they are an invasive, nuisance bird, their murmurations always made me stop what I was doing to watch. They seemed to like the trees outside the library.

I made one last stop at the library to warm up before I headed out of town for the day. I am as attached to my old library as I am to the lions outside the library in New York. My library has a comforting smell of paper and quiet. I entered through the kids' side and confirmed that the Nancy Drew Mysteries are approximately where I left them. The Newbery Award books are no longer over the fireplace, but that might be because there are too many now. There are also a growing number of computer stations. But there's also a crafts table with rounded scissors and paste on it and this weekend they were screening Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the one that I saw in the kids' room there when I was about 6 or 7, not that other one). And I saw a kid get his very first library card and go with his mom to pick out his very first books.

I couldn't submit any hometown photos, because the antique dealers in the old post office building are gone, my former next door neighbor's back yard could never have contained that massive garden that I remember and the drugstore that burned down when I was ten was never replaced. But someone else is getting his first library card at the Athenaeum and there are smiling people on the new bike path and birds are overhead. I'll pass the town on to all of them. Make the most of it.