By: Jennifer Richardson Holt
I remember when I was very young, probably in lower elementary school when some family had come to visit us. I remember my cousin making a comment that all the adults in the car at the time, which would have had to have consisted of my parents and my aunt and uncle, found rather hilarious. When I looked in the direction he was peering at what inspired this comment I understood. We were driving through a thoroughly common wooded area and some of the seemingly infinite numbers of pines had been thinned. In this opening of the landscape high on a distant hill, stood an ancient chimney. My cousin (from a different part of Alabama) had commented that he didn’t know we grew chimneys where we lived as well. I see the humor but upon reminiscing upon his statement it has made me wonder what other secrets that these forests and hollows hold. This was many, more than I’d care to discuss, years ago and the small, replanted pines have already once again swallowed up that chimney and many more sites, some with far more than just a disintegrating piece of house. In thinking about many of the blogs I’ve written, they often involve old places lost to time. I can’t help but wonder just what treasures lie beneath kudzu or are obscured in tangles of dewberry thorns not to mention what have been crushed under logging trucks or by the machinery of new development. I am not against progress and I know that progress often requires old growth forest as well as old build structures to be committed only to memory, but what about those old places that weren’t sacrificed to growth and advance? What about those that are simply lost?
It physically pains me to see a beautiful old house left to rot. For that matter I don’t like to see even small humble houses forgotten either. I suppose I am too wrapped up in history but all I can think is that these were homes. They may just be houses now but they were homes. For some of the occupants they may have been the best thing they ever possessed. These arrangements of wood and stone were the spiritual foundations that generations were built upon. Some of the dearest and most poignant memories of someone’s entire existence upon this mortal coil have their epicenter in these collections of brick, wood and stone. Perhaps I am too sentimental to allow such strong reactions but the idea of a home being allowed to decay and collapse or be engulfed by the landscape upon which it sits is, to wax poetic (as I am prone to do) downright heartbreaking. I suppose I just have a hard time separating the lives that were within a place from the place itself. If you get right down to it, to me every home should have a historic marker, not just the ones that would best serve the history books. Isn’t every house full of someone’s history? Don’t they all hold pivotal life moments of life and death and love and abandonment that if the common man were writing his story would easily fill the most consequential chapters?
Not even a mile from my home there are the remnants of what once was a very fine home. It was not a mansion but in it’s day, which I would say is likely the late 1800’s it was a very nice place. I once saw what appeared to be a college class or something of the like, judging by the age of the crowd, standing in front of what used to be the gate to the drive of this house. One older fellow stood seemingly instructing the group of young adults who all wrote dutifully in notebooks. It made me wonder what he was telling about this old grand home as he often gestured toward it as the students would look up and return to their writing. I don’t know what made this place worth instruction but since, the expansive front porch has collapsed upon itself and the vegetation has so overtaken it that you would no longer know it is there other than the occasional unexpected silver glint of the tin peeking from the rust on the roof. This old house was worthy of at the very least a small group to make notes about as someone told its story but now, it is forgotten and has been left to be shrouded and eventually vanish. It just seems so wrong. At the risk of being overly dramatic, it seems, well, disrespectful.
Maybe I put too much stock in this sort of thing. Maybe I should just see it as wood and stone returning to the earth from whence it came. I love ghost stories because for a place to have one it must have a history. I guess to me every house is haunted and not in the macabre sense of the word but in the sense that it is a place filled with a past and intensity of emotion the likes of which some of us may not even be able to fathom. It gets more obvious to me this time of year. Those trails of daffodils that lead to nowhere and the lack of leaves revealing structures lost during the warmer seasons are like neon arrows pointing to echoes of the past that seem to be falling on deaf ears. In my minds eye I see spirits looking forlornly from collapsing doorways. I imagine I hear fathers reading from giant family Bibles and grandmothers humming as they knead biscuit dough, all wafting from tattered curtains and panes long since glassless. I guess I am rambling on about these places because I just want it to be known, that I promise to remember. I will look at the hearthless chimneys and the gardenless flowers and know. I will remember the laughter and the tears and know that to someone they meant the world. I will imagine my own stories so that in some miniscule ways the histories of the homes will live on. Maybe you could do the same. There will never be a paragraph on a plaque for them but maybe you could close your eyes and smile and offer a knowing nod to the forgotten ghost on the long gone porch swing. You would want someone to remember too.
Prose and Possibilities 