I was recently back in Salisbury, after not having southwardly crossed the Yadkin for some while ( also a while since a westerly, “mountain-directed” crossing). While there, I returned again to my boyhood Old Concord Road home.
It had been a while since I had visited Charlie and Pam, who live there. They seem ageless, so maybe the old place is magical, and if I had never left, I would still be 23 (I should now insert enough “LOLS” to equal the amount of lollipops necessary fill Walmart).
As mentioned before (but now, differently), the “carbon footprint” of coal and oil heating in my youth still makes its mark in that granite fireplace and mantle, seemingly melded with black specks of biotite mica (a granite ingredient), so that only sandblasting could remove it (but that would harm the granite).
So now we have a new “species” of rock: inorganic granite infused with a building block of life, carbon. Carl Sagan surmised “strange lifeforms” in space; and a very imaginative science-fiction writer might write of a curious “genesis” happening within the confines of something as reassuringly normal and comforting as Charlie and Pam’s fireplace.
While in a “science” vein, the replacements for the struck-down mass of carbon-based, “chlorophylenated” vegetative lifeforms out back of my old back yard have grown not very far above my head (trees planted several years ago following the logging of my old woods have really grown). That forest of my youth was so thick you “couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” Its extent is a little more visible now.
While sitting with Charlie and Pam in my old living room, I felt a certain “presence,” surely only noticed by me. I thought of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” when the ghost of Christmas past speaks of “shadows of things which have been,” and “not long past, but your past” (in this case, mine).
It was like a Madame Tussaud’s of memories, nothing immobile in solid wax, but “shades” of my mother, father, brother and me moving about as we had in numerous days of a shared past there.
While talking with Charlie and Pam, I glanced out the living room windows, where, while growing up, I had seen the procession of sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and rain repeatedly freezing into snow and repeatedly melting back to rain.
You might say there was an “elephant in the room,” but a positive one. This “elephant” consisted of many aspects of my past, and was also like the “elephant parts” defined as “elephant” by the proverbial group of blind men. So I’m part of that “elephant” (hopefully, a part mentionable in mixed company).
Glancing at the living room ceiling, I remarked on its unchanged series of narrow white boards. Charlie and Pam said they had a different ceiling installed after first moving in, but later reinstalled the saved original. I mentioned that as a teenager I would gaze at that same patterned ceiling in my bedroom, while lying on my bed listening to classical music, wondering if my future, like it, would be orderly (Bach), or hectic (Stravinsky).
My old bedroom is now Charlie and Pam’s bedroom; and at no point did I consider asking them if I could perhaps go in, shut the door, and lie on their bed for an hour or so, gazing at the ceiling for old time’s sake (and I’m sure that after some time, they would NOT have knocked on the door, hollering: “What are you doing in there all this time by yourself with the door shut?”).
It was good to see Charlie and Pam again, my most recent visit there now filed away in the old house’s “archives.”
In my fossil collection, I have a fossil crinoid’s “hold fast,” once anchoring the creature to the sea floor. Like it, the many remaining trees of my old “yard proper” hold fast with their roots to that solid, rocky ground; for if they didn’t, they would fall.
So I hold fast too, to that place where I first grew.