Shades and Colors

This post was started but never published some very long time ago...

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The gate at the front of the road is closed. I'm not surprised by this, I was warned it would be, yet the discovery feels meaningful. I am in Mississippi, standing at the mouth of a winding gravel road. My crunching footsteps bring me down the small hill, past a culvert and small grotto filled with Catholic saints and a small concrete bench. Sun has surrendered to shade. Green smothers brown as fern and moss grow along every imaginable crevice. Ahead is my first memory, at least I believe it to be my first memory.

Imagine a three year old perspective of sunlight growing beyond the canvas of trees, a field of corn to the left and open pasture to the right. These are viewed in the split screen view afforded a small body trying to see over the dash of a large 1970's automobile.

 There is a gentle rise that leads up onto a high point of the surrounding property. In my memory the tree limbs above create a sort of tunnel of shadow exiting onto a sea of bright opened pasture before being swallowed by the cool shade of three 200 year old oak trees that guard a small brick house like sentries.

The purpose of my visit is not to wax nostalgic, I need no trip for that. I am a sentimental fool, I know it, so does everyone else.

My Granny is no longer living in the small brick house, she is living with my Uncle not far from my home in Texas. Her place is a sort of halfway house now. It carries the passing resemblance of the place I knew as a child, yet has the strange feel of a house in a state of metamorphosis from a home-place into something else. This place has always been welcoming, warm, and full of that undefinable quality known as family. You feel like you belong when you're there, but now there is the gate, and an empty feeling.  It's like visiting an alien world where you recognize the shades, but not the colors themselves.

Gone are the mornings where I would wake to the smell of frying eggs, to the gurgle of the percolating coffee pot, and to the sound of a cuckoo clock chiming it's mechanical melody.  Granny is in the kitchen, working around the stove.  Gramps is there drinking coffee, and sipping grapefruit juice.

I'm here to visit my Grandma, not take a trip down that well worn lane called memory.  I'm here because my Grandma Mac has been moved into a nursing home. My parents have been cleaning out her house, getting everything in order.  If my Granny's feels empty, my Grandma's is desolate.  There is sparse furniture, and nothing else.

I'm closing in on 40, and it feels like it must be someone else's age, not my own.  I believe that my childhood is here, in these two places, Granny's and Grandma Macs.  I feel it every time I step onto either place.  Maybe that's the reason this place at 35 feels so wrong.

When you go to places that fill so much emotional real estate it brings so much to mind, and leaves the lingering feeling of loss long after you've left.  The places are the shading to a picture, they give the faintest outlines of what the places are, it's the people who are the color that give a place definition.