Thomas Wolfe was Right

" And again, again, in the old house I feel beneath my tread the creak of the old stair, the worn rail, the white washed walls, the feel of darkness and the house asleep, and think, "I was a child here; here the stairs, and here was darkness; this was I, and here is Time." Thomas Wolfe, 'Return'

Today's photo is a shot of Emily hiking around in the Briére marshlands birdwatching, down near the coast of Mesquer. Heron city!

Last week my old friend Paul sent me the links to their family's house-for-sale, and a link to the model of the new home they're buying in Alabama. It was a bit of a shock - when you move far away, you inevitably freeze-frame everything about your previous home and when it changes, it's more unsettling than normal. This was a bigger reality shift than expected, however, because it caused both Emily and myself to realize that we now have virtually no roots left in what we think of as "home", except for our parents. For the past four years, we've both entertained vague ideas of eventually flying back over for a working vacation - a visit to the Richmond pipe show followed by a leisurely drive down to North Carolina to visit all our old friends... except that now, they are all gone. Virtually every last person I knew and was close with has moved out of state, which brings the realization that a visit "home" will be solely a visit to our parents (and a stop at Pipe & Pint, of course!).

My last remaining grandparent died the summer before we moved overseas, and with his passing I also lost my connection to my childhood in the form of his family farm, where I spent a lot of adventurous hours as a kid. It's funny to look back at this timing now, because I was really unaware at the time of just how utterly severed I was from everything in my life previously. No more farm, no more white painted house with creaky floors, no more gates and ponds and outbuildings. My parents moved around the time that I left for college, and I never really had any roots in their second house - later, they moved again to a house with which I have no emotional connection at all (It is a perfectly nice place, but it is not "home" to me in the sense that my childhood house in Welcome was home - it is simply the place where my parents happen to live). Ergo, when I now think of revisiting Davidson County, I come up blank. There is literally nothing there for me to see again, nothing familiar that would feel like "coming home" - people, yes, but not places. Odd, that. When the closest remaining place you can get to a familiar childhood haunt is Hanes Mall (undoubtedly also changed from end to end), one questions the idea of trying to revisit the past at all.