Reflections on a Trip to my Childhood Home.

I went down to my old home in Hurricane recently. I happened to be driving past the area with Amber and had nothing else to do. I know some people who have lived in almost the same area for most if not all of their lives. I lived in Hurricane for about 10 years. Its still where I think when I think of my childhood.

We lived on Cow Creek. Yes, that was really the name of it. The place is like some kind of lost Narnia to me. It was magical and mundane. Isolated. At night you could look up into the sky and see so many stars that it seems impossible that anyone could have ever named them all. It was almost perfect for me as I was growing up.

My grandparents (through my great-grandfather) had several acres of land on either side of the road about 3 miles off the main thoroughfare. We lived opposite them for a few years and then moved across the street onto the same patch they lived on. It was spacious, but not ranch-like.

I went up in the woods nearly every day. Played with my sister and sometimes our dad. We were discouraged from having too much to do with the neighbor kids. The problem being that they were not of our faith and therefore "bad associates". Looking back on it, my mom probably had the right idea for the wrong reasons. We were surrounded mostly with crazy creekers.

Development of the area I grew up in started decades ago. It was going on when I lived there. There is a bend in the road made up by two 90 degree turns. On one side for many years there was very little but a grassy field. Around the time that I left they had begun building the "mansion style" homes. They were nice homes. Expensive for the area, but not mansions. I had lived all my life up to that point in a trailer though, so homes without wheels were kinda fancy to me.

Going through there now, some parts are unrecognizable. Ten big, rich homes have become 50 or 60. Probably more. Further down the road, a bit closer to my property, there had been an old farm-style house. Also big but in a way that seemed real, and not like a castle. It had an ENORMOUS maple tree in the front yard. I think this tree might have been the first object on earth that I thought was beautiful all on my own without being told so. Every fall it would turn bright orange on one side and stay green on the side facing the house. I've never seen another tree do that. It was the damnedest thing.

The tree is gone now. So is the house. In the woods when a tree falls over and dies, fungi and mushrooms grow all over it. Looking at the rich new houses in the shiny, gated community that now stood there, I found myself thinking that. Just like a fungus. They grow over night and normally on something dead or a pile of shit. We were creek people I guess. So I guess we were shit.

Depressing.

The place I grew up lives so vibrant in my memory that it seems totally impossible that I can't go there. I remember the exact way that it felt to run full speed down the hill I lived on. Recklessly abandon everything and just hurtle down hill. My feet would pound the earth and I would think about what my mother had told me about gravitation and how it meant that the earth was leaping up to meet me just a little with every step. The power of the impacts seemed to shake the teeth in my head. Seemed to make my spine slap together like a slinky. Sometimes I'd just fall down on the grass. My mind would try to understand the earth itself. The great teaming mass of it. And me there on it, like the Little Prince of my own planet.

These are just words. Even if you read them and you understand exactly what they say and just how I mean it, you still wouldn't understand what I'm talking about. I suppose I don't really know. Not completely. I'm grasping.

I've always been aware of death. When I was a little kid I sprayed a giant grasshopper with WD-40 until it died. I don't know why. I felt ashamed. I'd killed something beautiful for no reason other than my own amusement. Under the weight of guilt, I buried that grasshopper. I cried about it. I didn't tell anyone for a long time. Who would understand the Sin of Grasshopper Murder? Yet I know to this day that If the Universe had a God and a Judgment Day that I would have to answer for that act. I could show you the exact spot on that property where I buried it.

At some point after that, in 1985, my grandfather died. The last time I ever saw him alive he was standing on the poach of his trailer with my grandmother. We had spent the evening with them and were walking home. He stood there in the inky dark wearing a white tshirt and a pair of brown Dickies. I hugged him. He was smiling. He seemed like the earth itself to me, like Cow Creek, like the woods and the grey paved road that meandered though the creek, like the azure sky and the garden and the junky swing set. He seemed like he would always be there. He was dead about 8 hours later on a beautiful Sunday Morning.

I'm going to die just like him. And everything that seems important or permanent to me will change and die and turn into things I'd never recognize. Every word I've ever uttered will be forgotten. And everything that I'd wanted to say or do, but never did, will never exist. Even my memories of all this splendor will just rot into the ground with me. I'm good but I can't beat entropy.

I should be able to just live like water rushing downstream. I should be able to transcend all this. Exist in every perfect moment. Mostly I think I do. But then I see that big ugly house where the maple used to be. And I think about my grandfather.