You can never erase the memories that remain
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- May 28, 2017
- 949
There’s a set of abandoned train tracks in the middle of Oaxaca City, Mexico. They are broken in spots with weeds growing in the middle, and if you stand in the middle of them and look either direction, they fade distinctly into the distance.
I stood at one point of them, walking their rails, pressing my hand to the metal, and imagined what kind of cargo they once carried: goods, people, animals. I imagined the horn blowing hard, and then I could see a small boy step off one of the cars, dazed and unsure as he tasted the air of a strange place. I could see the initial fear in his eyes as he walked the length of the tracks and into a town he didn’t know.
The remnants of people remain. I carefully notice empty spaces where now there is only swaying grass, a small patch of concrete that signals a driveway that a car once turned into one thousand times to arrive home, or the bright, happy faces of planted flowers that bloom in front of specters of now-gone framework.
We traveled the length of Route 66, and I couldn’t get enough of the abandoned, derelict buildings that sat forlorn yet proud, nearly oblivious to those that travel by them every day. At least they were standing where I could still see them.
Our area in Holmes County doesn’t have many rundown buildings. We push forward with building projects, tear down homes and smooth things over so that you’d never know that space wasn’t always a parking lot. Evidence of a home once standing now destroyed, any ripple of it leveled into oblivion. But I know better.
Am I a keeper of the past, ever doomed to visit memories of what once was? I am drawn to these spaces where I once zoomed my bike by as a child, collecting stones and placing a bottle of pop in the basket attached to the handlebars. Because they’re gone doesn’t mean they didn’t exist, just like the people that once inhabited them.
I grew up in the fourth house down on the left from Berlin Mennonite Church, and across from us once sat a beautiful farm that is now an aluminum-sided thrift store with a paved parking lot. I love thrift stores and haunt them every week, but the irony of seeking out treasures on a piece of land where a beautiful garden and impeccable home once stood makes me think hard.
If I woke up in the morning and peered out the window of my bedroom, I often saw Ed and Eva puttering about, she with her apron on and he with his cap. Their property was neat and tidy in a way I’ll never hope to replicate: the lines of their home and the lay of the land expansive and beautiful and the ring of the bell that stood outside that meant “get on in for lunch!”
I now purchase knickknacks and dig through racks of clothing on the same piece of land.
Sometimes I gaze across the street to the house I grew up in, Mom’s spectacular garden and landscaping gone, but the house still there, remaining firm on the corner where it’s stood for over 100 years.
It houses a family with children, and that makes me happy. I look over and see Carol’s house with its red-brick lines so familiar, ones I looked at out the other window of my bedroom. I see Dick and Gertie’s house, the Spielman house, and Welly and Hazel’s house: all there and solid. For now.
I am happy these locales, once part of my everyday landscape, still stand, but so many others are gone. We march into the future, and I embrace that, and though I pine for what has been lost, not for one second do I believe I need to go back to it, that it made my life and yours greater then than now.
I don’t misplace the pang for what was as something that needs revived and relived, and that goes for the spaces I felt them in. The memories remain, and I’ll never forget where things once stood — the empty spaces now filled with new — but I’ll look forward, knowing that they’re always remembered. And that I can always go back to them in my mind.