Ethyl Remembers: Going Home

Thomas Wolfe wrote 'you can't go home again'.  And the older I get the more I think he's right.  Oh, yes, you can go back to the physical place you originated.  And you can refer to it as the old home place.  But it's not the same.  The people that were there when you were young are all gone.  Death has claimed them.  The person sitting in the porch swing or in the big front porch chair is not the same;  maybe the same blood line, but at least two generations removed.  The young have claimed the spot inhabited by the old.  Life has entered the second, and sometimes even the third, phase of existence.  Even the paths in the pastures, which the cows and horses had worn into the earth, and which you walked so often as a young girl, are long since gone.  They have grown over with new vegetation.  There is a melancholy to being there, to realizing that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
And you begin to realize as you age just how important it is to have roots.  To have somewhere you are from.  When I was young I thought the best thing in the world would be to leave that place behind.  To get away and not come back.  But I did come back, and often.  I never really went too far away.  At least never so far away that I could not return whenever I pleased.  I remember coming back when my boys were small and camping out in the pasture.  Sitting up a big orange tent and then building a bonfire in the red clay gully down below it.  Of an October night and roasting hot dogs and marshmallows on the campfire, and watching as a thousand stars became a thousand points of light in the cool, clear fall night.  My mother joined us at our bonfire.  In the pasture there were no power lines or buildings to obstruct the view, and the night sky literally came alive when the sun went down and the stars came out.
A maple tree had grown from a small sapling on the banks of that gully, and my mother loved that tree.  She looked forward every autumn to the days when it would change colors.  We build our fire there, underneath the tree.  After she died, I walked back over the hillside and looked at that tree.  It had begun to deteriorate too.  Parts of it had died and in the fall it no longer had the brilliant colors it once displayed.  It was almost as if it realize she was no longer there to admire it so why bother to put on it's show. 
My sons have long since grown to adults, but sometimes I wonder if they remember camping out in the pasture, tossing a football with their dad or flying a kite in the open field, savoring grandma's sweet tea, her banana pudding, or all the junk she kept on the kitchen table just for the pure delight of her grandchildren.  When we would leave Memphis and head to Iuka ,they would begin to contemplate what goodies she would have for their anxious little mouths. And then never leaving to head home without a brown paper sack filled to the brim with cookies, moon pies, and fourteen different varieties of candies.  The youngest child always got to control the sack, but with the firm instructions it was to be shared with the others. She was a grandmother extraordinaire, the type every kid dreams of having.
The neighbors that lived on each side of us are also dead.  The houses they inhabited are literally falling down and going back to the elements.  But our house is still standing, inhabited by members of our family.  In actuality, it's in better condition that it was when we lived there.  When I walk around in the rooms, I wait for my mother to pop out of her kitchen, laugh her little 'whee' laugh and tell us all to hurry and come to the table before the biscuits get cold.  Thomas Wolfe was right.  You can't go home again.