Time and Distance

One of the signposts of age is your inability to remember five minutes ago, while remembering every damn detail about events of thirty years ago. Everybody shake your head in affirmation in unison. Very good. When I was young, the trip to "The Farm" was the movement which relaxed every molecule of my body. And I mean relaxed. As I sit at this computer and take stock of my physical being, I notice that every little muscle in my neck and shoulders and parts of my stomach are tight with the unconscious effort of living. Even my toes are curling.

I have been trying for a long time to find a substitute for that physical journey to "The Farm". So far the only close place of respite is Callaway Gardens. I can go there on a Sunday afternoon and feel closer to relaxation than anything I know of. Of course, I have to be careful. They might try to charge me extra next time I go there for a "relaxation" fee.

I suppose we all look for that place of succor as we get older. It is no surprise that our memories turn to earlier times in our lives for that place. We can't remember any other place!

So I am continually thinking about "The Farm." I remember Frank and I crossing the fields of dark brown earth and finding cow carcasses in the woods. I remember Frank covered with hogslop or stuck in the stable on the back of a cantankerous pony. I remember bringing a robin's egg back from one of the farm ponds and accidently cracking it on the sofa as I sat down. I remember discovering hatched chicks in one of the hand's cabins and playing around the farm with the sons of the hands. I remember a cold day in November when Dad and Frank and I seemingly killed every rabbit and quail on the farm (I apologize for the image to my more squeamish readers. We didn't shoot that many rabbits and quail. My memory has added a little gloss to the vision in its retelling for the benefit of the "mighty hunters of yore".). I remember grand meals of vegetables, turkey and ham on Holidays at the long dining room table and bacon lettuce and tomato sandwiches in the kitchen. I remember the English setter puppies: John, Paul, George, Peter and Mary.

And I remember a cold night in December, when everyone, including my in-laws, sat down together in the dining room, while the unyielding storm screamed its misery around the farm house outside, dumping snow on everything, and we ate the last supper there: the traditional gifts to our grieving. And I was so safe and so happy and so full of yearning and so sad. And I often long for some return to what was, what will be, but can never be again.

So you continually try to recreate that place of respite in the place in which you find yourself now. Because for the next generation, these dreams are mere legends and stories and whisps of air and where you find yourself now will be their soft, silky cocoon of memory in years to come.