Surviving in memory

 

When I traveled to Europe this summer with Kathleen and her sibs to explore the Capcara homeland in the Carpathians of northern Slovakia and Poland, I joked that this year we could tour the McIntyre homeland in Elizaville, Kentucky. Some sites: 

The school that I attended for six grades (and which my parents attended for twelve) has been an apartment building for more than half a century. The general store my grandfather owned (and my father operated for some years after his death) is closed. The Presbyterian church in which I was baptized and confirmed, and of which my mother and her childhood best friend were the last members, has long since be secularized by the presbytery and, I think, now serves for storage. The post office where my mother served as postmaster for twenty-four years (and above which we lived) was shut down by the Postal Service. 

The most recent lost landmark is the farmhouse my great-grandfather, Benjamin Given Early, built circa 1890. My older sister, Georgia, sold the family farm some years ago to an Amish family. We agreed that the land should be owned by people who lived on it and worked it, and neither of us was prepared to go back and take on the responsibility. Last month the owners tore down the house, salvaged what lumber could be repurposed, and burned the rest. It may have been too troublesome to maintain. * 

This is the house where my grandmother fed me her blackberry jam on toasted salt-rising bread, and where I saw her bank the coal fire in the grate just before bed. This is the house where I learned to play the big upright piano in the parlor, and it was in that parlor that I was married the first time. This is the house in which Georgia was born and in which my grandfather and mother died. Now it no longer exists. 

The physical remains of my parents and grandparents lie beneath gravestones on a hillside in the Elizaville Cemetery, from which site it was once possible to see the family farmhouse half a mile or so away. My parents and grandparents will not be completely gone so long as I retain memory of them. And just so, as long as I retain the memory of them and these places, I will remain myself.

*A strict regard for the truth requires mention that the three unoccupied bedrooms upstairs were always a little creepy. Only a few rooms of the house could be heated in the winter, and the whole house was stifling in the summer, requiring the Southern strategy of Not Moving. Since the house was raised slightly on a stone foundation without a basement, it was hospitable to Nature, evidenced by the shed snakeskins found in bureau drawers in those unoccupied bedrooms every spring after the winter guests had departed.