Past remains Present

The tree – that proud elm by the railroad tracks – is gone. The little girl trudging along the snowy road to catch the school bus waiting for her along the main street next to the park, is gone. The house that has stood up above for over a hundred years, adding one room at a time, is gone. Her own home, clad first with the traditional white clapboards later covered with rustic brown siding, is gone. The wisteria vine that reached the third-floor roof where her father insisted she help him put on new roofing is gone. The greenery along the gutter had helped her not be aware of how high she was from earth. The mailman in his battered car braving snowstorms to bring letters from across the seas, is gone. The girl, her hands rough from farm work, smeared them with lanolin. She covered them at night with white gardening gloves and she too is gone. She has grown, become an adolescent, and as she weeds the pansies so the coming year their smiling faces will be lifted to the sun, lets the breeze caress her naked budding breasts, knowing there is no one around to see her. She has outlived her pansies but she too is now gone. A steel cable anchored the tall hickory in front of the house when a hurricane was forecast. It outlived the hurricane but not time. The polka-dotted guinea hens, forgetful of their Egyptian origins, have long gone elsewhere.

They are all gone, yes, but I can still see them, the little girl on her way to school, shivering despite the sheepskin jacket ordered from Sears, and longing for the warmth of the stable where she milked the goats. I can still feel the fear she had to overcome when she was made to move around on the rooftop of her house, mitigated by the greenery of the vines that are now gone.  Yes, much is gone, but I know what it felt like to be that little girl. And the river in the valley still flows through the town, harbouring alewives, too spiny to eat, in the creeks where once a slightly older girl fell off her horse to keep them company. The railroad track still runs through the fields, although it no longer spews smoke from the coal it burned, covering the passengers with black dust on their way to Boston if they left the windows open. The two sisters perched up on high overlooking the valley would sometimes count the freight cars, as many as a hundred, as they trundled along to who knows where. But that was years ago. The fields along the valley bottom are still lush with grass and flowers, milkweed with its sticky sap and daisies. They are no longer turned into fodder for cows and goats when she and her mother pitched forkfuls onto the wagon to be taken to the barn.  Here children once climbed up high to jump down into the sweet-smelling prickly hay below. The cat, one of a tribe of cats, now long gone, no longer waits, sitting upright, for a stream of milk to be aimed at her by the hired hand as he is milking.  He is gone, and the cows, replaced by brown and white Toggenburg  goats from Carl Sandburg’s herd, have both been put out to pasture.

It is a past but one that will always live in the present, memories that no one can eradicate.