Wild Wonderful West Virginia Part II

OK, so we're visiting West Virginia. Though I was born there, I mainly grew up in South Florida - Miami in fact. But we visited WVA a lot, and as it turns out, I actually lived in three different houses there. On Saturday my sister Jeanette (soul sister as well as natural sister) wanted to drive around and look at the ones she lived in (2 of the 3, as I'm 16 months older than her).

So... we drove to the houses we lived in as well as my Mom's family place. We always just called it The Hill - because it was at the top - you guessed it - of a hill. Interestingly, the houses we lived in looked pretty much the same, only smaller. But The Hill.... The Hill is not the same place at all.

The Hill was my childish idea of paradise for many reasons. The house itself is log. Not one of those prefab sort of log homes. This one was the real deal, built by my Mom's family. As I mentioned, it sat atop of a hill. Around it was just the right amount of lawn - maybe an acre. On the acre were out buildings: an office, a woodworking room, a barn (with a loft to jump out of), and across from the barn a chicken coop. Oh yeah, and there was a barbecue built out of stone. Very cool. Very mountainy. Very West Virginia.

You could walk down a path and over the hill a bit and come to an orchard. Or... you could play in THE WOODS!!! Can you tell that was my favorite part of all?! Well, OK, the woods and the barn were equally my favorites. I still dream about the barn.

But today the only thing up there is the log house, and even it's been changed. Changed in subtle but disappointing ways. The only thing that's been improved is the front porch, which has been made sturdier. All around the base of The Hill are houses. It didn't used to be that way. We could run through the woods like wild Indians as kids, without a bunch of pesky houses being in the way...

Today before we left we went by my uncles house - the one who's now in a nursing home. He's been living in the house my grandmother spent the last 20 or so years of her life in. It is also a house I knew well and have very specific memories about. Guess what? It's not at all the same place either.

When we left it occurred to me that it's easier to see people and places deteriorate slowly over time. It's less of a shock. The changes in these places and people remind me of Chris Rice's song Tick Tock. The past is locked. The future is, well, the future. So the only sensible thing to do is to live now. Today. In the present. We will carry the past with us in to the future, but today is what God gifts us with.