The Gathering: Time Travelling Home

I visited my hometown this passed week. Often, there is a part of me that calls out for it, and often, there is something inside me that knows it is calling to me. I don’t get back down there often, but when I do it refreshes my soul. There is something about the way there; I’m flooded with memories. The way home. It’s not that my hometown is a particularly fancy town, in fact quite the opposite, and every time I go back, there is of course something new or someone new, but mostly things are the same. There isn’t a street in that town that I didn’t know someone, if not many people. A lot of things haven’t changed; the lady at the corner was in her front yard gardening, as if no time had passed at all. But time had passed, her son, whom I used to play with, is grown like me, and moved on like me. I feel lucky to have had that town, to have had that childhood.

I stood out front of my old house for a while. The owners, maybe 3 owners ago, had taken down the window shutters, making them seem smaller than I remember. Luckily for me, my old neighbour from there still lives in the same house right next to our old one, she’s also my best friend’s mom, so getting to peer into my old backyard from her backyard was easy enough. Like time travelling, it was. My mom and I went to our favourite breakfast spot there, and wandered around together. We stopped and visited with friends. We wandered uptown passed the post office, and went into the local convenience store. I swear it used to be bigger. I used to rent movies from this place when I was a child, VHS movies nonetheless, and where the rows of tapes used to live, now only one row for movies is needed as DVD’s take up much less space. The other half of the movie section is now used to display greeting cards. But it still smelled the same, and the sign out front – that has never changed now matter how many times the owners have changed, is still the same.

And, as I reminisce on my reminiscing the song midnight rider comes to mind, although while there the songs that came back to me were more like What if god was one of us by Joan Osborne and the other mid 90’s hits from my eclectic music past. We’re always told not to live in the past, but sometimes visiting for a little while is needed.

#TheGathering