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A sense of place

Today I was having another one of my low-energy days. I was resting and listening to a radio program documentary about the disappearance of small town America. That might be a news story to people living on the coasts, but it’s old news here in the heartland where nearly everyone can remember a town that now either no longer exists, or is barely hanging on for dear life.

It’s a brain drain. Corporate farming now means the family farm is either a place where people work to exist, often working outside the farm to preserve their way of life – or it’s a feeling of nostalgia – a memory from our Normal Rockwellian past that makes us feel all wholesome inside. Today kids that grow up in small town America more often than not go away to college and don’t return. They go in search of jobs and spouses – neither one of which is available in so many dying communities.

It’s a strange feeling to remember places that no longer exist. After all, in your memory, they seem so alive and present.

The house we lived in when my mother was working in Osterholz is now no longer there. Several years ago, in one of those nostalgic moods, I tried to find it on Google Earth. I found my old school and followed the highway down to our village, and then to the turnoff to our street. I found the place where I was sure our house should be, but it wasn’t there.

Weeks later I mentioned it to my mother. “Oh, didn’t I ever tell you, it burned down.” I suddenly felt this sense of loss, even though I hadn’t lived there for years and the house had been gone for nearly a decade. I guess I always imagined someday going back and walking through the neighborhood and the Moores and pointing to the places where I did this or that as a teenager.

The house was a modest one, but it sat at the crest of a hill and overlooked the rolling Tuefel’s Moore (Devils Moor). I remember in the fall and spring you’d look out on your way to school and the fog would be settled in the lower places like a thick, fluffy blanket. In the spring a certain crop would ripen (I’m not sure what it was but they grow it all over Germany) and it would look as if God took a French’s mustard bottle and squirted it out over the top of the land. Here and there you could even find the flower of my namesake – Heather – growing wild. There was a windmill, owned by our landlord, half way down the hill. The pasture that backed up to our yard almost always had black and white dairy cows quietly eating the grass. When I’d walk to the fence to stare at them, they’d always come over to let me pet their noses. I remember thinking how flimsy the fence really was, and that if the cows had even an ounce of intelligence, it wouldn’t keep them in that pasture at all.

My cousins know what it is to remember a place that no longer exists. They spent their entire childhoods in a farmhouse in Rego, Kansas. At the time Rego was pretty much a ghost town. The highway sign read “population 25” – that is until a local family made national headlines by having sextuplets and the sign had to change.

When I was a kid we always spent Thanksgiving at my aunt Brenda’s farm. When I think of my version of the all-American Thanksgiving, it’s at aunt Brenda’s old farm in the old farmhouse. My cousins and I would play our hearts out all day. We’d climb to the top of the hay in the hay barn and look out for miles. The house had a closed-in, 1920s style porch with a hard wood stove. It was the perfect place for a couple of kids with active imaginations to play. We’d pretend we were pioneers on the frontier, and that the porch was our cabin.

Mid afternoon the call would go out that the feast was ready and we’d all gather around and sing “Jonny Appleseed” as our prayer in the old-fashioned kitchen.

For us, it was a treasured day out of the year, but for them, it was their life.

Finally farming wasn’t sustainable and they had to move to town. They sold the land with the house. Not two weeks later the farm house exploded in a fireball from a natural gas leak. The new family hadn’t moved in and no one was hurt – thank God – but it’s another one of those places I think about returning to only to realize it’s no longer there.

These senses of place seem so permanent in our memories – but life brings change. That’s just the way it is. Still, today, listening to the rain against the window pain and the memories of places that no longer were, and I couldn’t help but return to these lost places from my own life, even if only in my mind.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Bright yellow crop = Reape Seed oil, Beautiful vivid colour. Lot of it grown in England as well.
Chris

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