Visit

Born and raised at the edge of this woods--a mix of beech and ironwood, maple, oak and birch--I've just returned from a visit home. There are only two years out of my whole life when I've failed to shuffle, daydreaming, through the thick duff of this forest.

A Cortland apple in one hand, a stick in the other, and a dog at my side, it was here that I whiled away every golden autumn afternoon of a gloriously slow childhood.

 And so it was last week, the tail-end of October, that I paid a visit.

 Despite the decades and the many miles of separation, much remains familiar. This tractor, dating from the 40's, runs like a charm and still lacks the brakes it never had.

The cast iron bell for calling my brothers in from the fields hangs near the kitchen. It's quiet now, mostly serving as a post for a bird feeder.

 

  The sumac is ablaze with color against the October clouds and sky, just as I remember.

 Asparagus continues to grow wild, making a show of itself bejeweled with rain drops.

 The glacial moraine on which the old farm rests still yields tiny fossils.

  The absence of the barn is sad. It's the one change I'll never get used to.

 The space where the barn once nestled into a gentle slope is the emptiest place I've ever seen, and yet it is the sharpest reminder of home.

 It exists only in memory, but there the barn is richly inhabited by warm cattle, silly chickens, skittish barn cats, coils of old ropes, a mountain of oats in the bin, and fragrant alfalfa everywhere. At the bottom of the empty silo lies an unlucky raccoon.  There are pigeons in the rafters.

Memory is actually pretty magical.

Assuming it was a happy place, it's a lucky thing to be able to go back to the geography of your childhood. Sometimes you can travel there for real, but the rest of the time you visit it in your head.

Thank you to Hilary, of The Smitten Image, for honoring this post.