If Trees And Sidewalks Could Talk

I'm visiting at my mother's house. Since I'm hardly ever here, I'm not here often enough to get used to it. So I still have all the associations from years ago, as to the neighborhood, right down to the particular trees and sidewalks.

For those of the family who live nearby and are here a lot, I'm wondering to myself if they lose that. As for me, when I step outside I see a particular tree and think of all the times I climbed it. Its branches are all hacked up now, since it's had 40 years to catch all the tree diseases that have gone around. But I look at the big old trunk and think of how we were present together like this all those years ago.

The sidewalk running out front is the same one. It's aged and hasn't been replaced. So it holds the echoes of our feet trip trapping on our way to school. The walls, the bricks, the road, etc., it's all the same.

I heard that someone bought a house in the neighborhood, and the house they bought is still identified by the folks who lived in it 50 years ago. There has to have been a dozen people in it over the years, just guessing, so it's remarkable that even those who live here all the time refer to it by the owners 50 years ago. Maybe that gives us hope that people will be referring to our own homestead by our name long after we're gone.

The place I'm sitting while typing this was an outside porch when I was a kid. But sometime over the years, may 25 years ago, it got enclosed and made into a wrap around room on the house. It used to be a wrap around porch. We kids would run through here, get up on the ledge of the porch and jump over the bushes, hundreds of times. It'd be five feet to the ground, but we didn't get hurt.

There's one place to my west, also now part of the wrap around room, where, when it was a porch, I jumped, but tripped somehow and hit my head on the sidewalk. I'm lucky I made it, actually, because it was the kind of clunk that might've messed me up very badly. That actually could explain some of my problems, if problems indeed they are. But as far as the level of sanity I feel like I have -- which could be a delusion, granted -- it didn't do me any long term damage.

I'll be pulling out of the place today and heading back to my normal place. It'll be the same as always then. This place here I'll always have in my memory ... and I can also see it on Google Maps. Their truck went by here sometime and got it from the two road angles. So it also lives in Google's memory forever.