My town that maybe never was

I miss my hometown, though I am not certain the town I miss ever belonged entirely to me, or that I ever experienced it in the way I hold it now.

I miss it as it was thirty years ago, forty years ago, and somehow I miss it from before I was born. There are places a person knows without having seen them. You find them in an old building whose walls have held the heat for seventy summers, in the smell of somebody’s kitchen, in the stories the old people tell when they forget they have told them before. You hear them in the names of families who once lived three houses apart and knew who was sick, who had married, and whose boy had gone away.

Most of that is gone now. A few remain who remember, and I have begun to fear their leaving. Because when they go, something more than a person goes with them. A street disappears. A kitchen disappears. A way of speaking, a way of visiting, a whole small world disappears. And there will be no one left who remembers exactly how it was.

I have seen that disappearance firsthand. I have followed people through their hospice journeys and watched a kitchen change as a life narrowed. Sometimes a matriarch was still cooking when I first met her, standing at the stove or moving through the room by habit, feeding the people she had fed for years. Then she cooked with help. Then she did not cook at all. Then the kitchen was empty, and it was only me and her daughter standing in it, surrounded by none of the things that had once made that kitchen the heart of the home.

My mother lost her parents three months apart. I am about the age she was when she began losing the people who came before her. This astonishes me. I thought there would be more time before I reached this part of the road.

I cannot believe how many years I have spent loving my family, longing for them, being angry with them, and still wishing the past might somehow become something more for me. Sometimes I want to revisit yesterday simply to experience it as it was, before I understood that it was ending. Sometimes I want to return so I can look harder, listen longer, and extract something I missed the first time.

And perhaps that is what I have been doing in reflecting on this town too. I miss a city that is dead and buried, though I have the audacity to say that from far away. At closer inspection, I know I would still find the same signs of life: a door opening, a familiar voice, somebody sweeping a porch, a kitchen still warm with the smell of coffee. I know the town is not truly empty. But it is dead to me.

The memories are gone. The gatherings have almost ceased. The buildings I once loved to patron are gone. What remains may still be living, but it no longer belongs to the life I remember.

I miss a family that now feels like an echo traveling down an empty hallway. I miss a life I once had and did not understand was temporary. It lasted such a little while, though when I was living it I believed it would go on forever.

What I would give to go back. Not forever. Maybe only for an afternoon. I would like to drive those old streets when they were still themselves. I would like to know who lived behind every screen door. I would like to sit at a kitchen table while somebody made coffee and somebody else came in without knocking.

But I also know this place was never gentle. I wish the heat did not burn everything it touched. I wish the air did not sometimes feel like something you had to endure rather than breathe. I wish the land had not been asked to carry so much, including chemicals, crops, honest and crooked ambition, and the terrible sun.

If it were different, I would raise my son there. I would teach him to love it. And I would not mind when he left, because leaving is part of loving a place too. You go because you must, and if you are lucky, some part of you spends the rest of your life finding its way home.

Sometimes I dream of the life my grandmother had for a little while. Nothing remarkable happened in it. That is what makes me want it.

She drove from the homes of friends to the homes of relatives. She spent quiet afternoons inside her own house. There were people nearby who knew her history without requiring her to explain it. There were doors she could walk through where somebody remembered her from her way back when.

I can make a life like that here, I suppose. I can visit friends. I can keep a quiet house. I can invite people to my table and fill the rooms with food, stories, and children. I can plant things and watch them grow.

But I understand now that there is a difference. Here, my roots go down not quite twenty years. There, they go down two generations, maybe three. And twenty years can make a home. I know that. But generations make something else. They make a place inside the body.

They settle into the marrow of the bones until the body remembers roads the mind has forgotten. They make you ache for people you hardly knew and houses that no longer stand. They make you homesick for years you never lived.

At least that’s what it does to my bones and maybe that’s why my bones know that place. And lately they ache for it.

There is nothing I can give them that will bring it back. No bargain can be made with time. The dead do not return, and now I realize neither do towns. We build over them. We rename things. We tell the stories badly and then, one day, not at all.

So I have only this. A small place at my table. I can bring what remains here.

A story. A name. A recipe. A photograph. The memory of somebody who remembered somebody before me.

And perhaps that is how a place survives after it is gone. Not whole. Not as it was. But carried from one body into another, while there is still someone left to remember.