COLUMN: It's Just a Country State of Mind: The space in between

They say that you can’t go home again. But sometimes it sure is a nice place to visit.

I was raised in the country at the far edge of Monroe County between Stinesville and Gosport. Most of my childhood centered around the town of Stinesville. I attended elementary school there and my grandparents lived there as well.

I moved to Owen County when I was 16 years old and I’ve lived here pretty much since that time.

I have accumulated a lot of memories of those old days, but surprisingly some of those memories did not resurface until I started revisiting some of the old familiar places.

I recently felt compelled, maybe even driven, to search through my past. Perhaps by being a member of the baby boomer generation, I needed to get in touch with myself by finding my roots.

So, on a sunny Saturday morning, I headed over to the old town to see if I could find anything familiar. At first, I just drove around up and down the streets. I passed by people sitting out on their front porch, drinking lemonade of all things. Some things never change.

And there was still that same old yellow dog that likes to sleep in the middle of the road. A person still must drive at a snail’s pace to allow the old yellow dog the time it takes to move to the other side of the road.

There’s still that little kid with the brown tussled hair, riding his bike up and down the road in the old neighborhood. He still wore that dirty old white T-shirt and grungy blue jeans with grass-stained knees.

And the old woman down the road with the old, wrinkled hands, who worked out in her garden, and who wore the old, faded dress with a bandana around her head, has been replaced with a younger version of herself.

The pole beans, tomatoes, and the onions are still growing there, and are still being carefully tended by loving hands that are less wrinkled but are still loving all the same. All the old houses were still there but most of them have been remodeled over the years. And new houses had sprung up where there used to be empty fields.

Most of the old folks who live there in the neighborhood had either passed on or moved away. But there were still a couple of families there that remembered the grown-up little girl and warmly welcomed her back for a visit.

She was offered some iced tea and a seat on the honored back porch that had always been reserved for only the most special of guests. The afternoon was sharing stories of “remember when,” and the time went by too quickly as time often does, and it was soon time for the grown-up little girl to return back to her present life.

It was a strange journey that I had embarked upon by revisiting some of the places of my embattled youth. It had been a time of struggle for me back in those days, which most of us find ourselves in at some point in our lives. But it had been a happy time for me as well.

The visit left me with mixed emotions. It was like finding a piece of myself again that was lost that I had never even realized was missing.

It reminded me of some of the lyrics from an old Jackson Browne song, Looking into you. In that song, he talks about going back to the old house that he grew up in for a visit to see where “his beginnings have gone.” I guess that’s sort of what I had been doing at the place I am at in my life.

During my journey through time, I learned that the past is not so very far away from any of us. It’s always present just below the surface in our subconscious minds. We can choose to let it come up into our consciousness, or we can leave it neatly packed away in our subconscious in a box that we call our memories. And the truth of who we were lies somewhere in the space between the two.

So, in revisiting my past, I found a lot more than I had bargained for. And it really wasn’t all that bad. They say that you can’t go home again. But sometimes it sure is a nice place to visit. And if you are lucky, while you are there, you might get a glass of iced tea!

Enjoy the rest of summer,
Susan