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The stumps and sidewalks are coming up today. So there’s no more of the silver maples left that used to line our block. The trees my kids grew up playing under. The trees that dropped piles and piles of leaves that they used to jump into in the Autumn and bury each other under. The trees that dropped their seeds, helicoptering down each summer. The trees that the woodpeckers, waxwings, chickadees and countless other birds, not to mention the ravens used to sit, eat, and nest in. When the children were little there was also an albino squirrel that used to hang out in our huge maple tree.
Out front the boulevard and the sidewalk and part of our yard are now just part of a soft and sandy soil path, roughly packed back down from the upheaval by the bucket of the endloader “digger” that did most of the work. It collects and reveals every footprint and track that is laid upon it.
When I picked Juliet up from college in Northfield last Sunday I talked to more than a few people who were curious about Ely. Everyone knows our town, it seems and that’s no surprise. They each have something that’s special to them in their mind when they remember our home town. They wanted to, of course, know about the smoke and the fires, the fishing and the restaurants. They wanted reassurance that Ely was the same as when and where it was that they had left it, safely in their minds.
That’s the thing, though, it isn’t the same, and it never has been. It’s been changing and evolving and regressing and progressing. That’s life. One day there’s a solid path under your feet with a tall tree overhead full of the sound of wind pushing gently through leaves bigger than your hand, full of birdsong and squirrel chatter, chipmunks and hairy woodpeckers chasing each other in staggered, halting jumps around its trunk with bark that looks like ancient feathers curling up on the edges. The next moment you have to cross to the other side of the street in order not to turn an ankle because the shifting loam underfoot hasn’t had time to settle. The next moment everything in this small part of the world on the edge of the wide wilderness is different. Like sand slipping through our fingers, blowing away in the high winds that refuse to give up on winter. (You did see the snow on Sunday, right?!)
People, places and experiences aren’t exceptions, they change, pass and deliver differently almost in the time it takes us to fall asleep and wake again. In the next month we’ll have a new street, new curb and gutter and new sidewalks. There will be new trees of a different variety planted in the boulevard and perhaps someday, when other children wake up in this house, they will grow up underneath them. Grow up with them? Who knows. Perhaps they’ll end up being my grandchildren, who am I to say?
What do you think of change? I have changed my hairstyle, my clothes, my beard, my cars, remodeled and added additions to the house, the yard, the fruit trees and amended my music tastes countless times over the years. Because I’m a self-made Nostalgiasist (yes I know it’s a made up word -- it’s my word), I also have an intense desire to keep people, things and places of my past preserved in memory. When possible I like to visit them just as they were, to order the same things from their menu and enjoy them with the people that mean the most to me. In many cases that is simply impossible and so I jog my memory with music and books that remind me of them, with tastes and smells that deliver on the original experiences. With a Chicago Hotdog with sport peppers, with a Japanese beer, with a visit to a place that is only of special significance to me and just a place to others in appearance and everyday use. And… And, I write. I write of the heaved sidewalk that the old tree’s roots pushed up. I write of the rain of sticky, sugary sap that would fall down every spring and into the summer. Of trying to teach the kids to ride bikes on these uneven old sidewalks and of crouching in the shade catching two-finger fastballs, sliders, cutters, breaking balls and a circle change. Or missing those baseballs and watching them roll down into the street.
Training wheels coming off after bikes tilting over with kids still on them. Skateboards slipping out from under my vans, skinned knees, matchbox cars and old Legos and vintage Star Wars action figures and cowboys and green army men in the dirt at the base of the mountainous roots and the crab grass and moss.
A thousand stories from thousands of hours from afternoons in the waning sunlight. Writing of sitting in chairs in the shade in the front yard as dusk creeps in before the mosquitos, of sitting in the sun with my dad while a pair of gray squirrels chased each other round and round the trunk.
Of kids with their first day of school pictures under the old arbor that is also no longer there with the maple in the background. Of boats parked in front and posing in front of the tree with big fish. Of fireflies, of fireworks overhead, of sunsets and first and last snowfalls. Of the many goodbyes after college began and ended for our kids and they arrived and departed from visits. Under our tree.
