Last week I proved that you can still go home. The places were the same, though so many of the faces are but memories as are the sounds and smells of years ago. The air hung heavier in the cool of the night. A brief shower had washed the humidity away.
I have long since staked out our form of Spencer’s Mountain within magnificent views of the Rockies, but it was the quiet confidence of a perennial Appalachian spring that allowed me to dream of the west. I had been introduced to it in my youth and those dreams of settling in Colorado were refined many times as the decades accelerated by. Born in Virginia, I had been lured away by the promise of endless dreams that, in many ways, were realized way more easily than I had thought, and which have now faded in my memory, from many decades ago.
Last week I strained to hear the sounds of yesterday. Through the blackness of night, a train called back to me from a distant thick, wooded valley. A neighbor’s dog noted I had stayed out late and began to let me know. The locusts were up at night and a late winter storm left the dogwoods and azaleas disguised for a few more days. Overhead a passenger jet flickered its way across the night sky. How many times I had been there, too. How different those times were and, still, the same.
You must seek out the canvasses of your past by going home as well from time to time. It’s easier to dream from the primary sources of your life. Odds are it may be that some of those dreams didn’t turn out the way you first conceived of them. Home has a way of very gently, quietly pointing that out to you. But home also shouts to you how well you realized so many of them. There is still love and laughter and life there enough to dream from the primary sources.
As I laid my head down, the thought occurred to me that I used to be younger when I travelled.