Trip Report: Return to the Old Homeplace

I am basing this assignment on a trip I made yesterday. Bill and I were in Berkley with Judy. While we were there, we decided to see if we could find the house she lived in when she was a very young. Listening to the stories that she told, as we took pictures of the house and noticing the ideas that her stories caused to flash in my mind convinced me that an exercise based on visiting the some old core sight in your life might open some interesting avenues for thought.

I am excited to see how this assignment works, so I hope you try it, unless something else grabs your attention and you want to write about that. The reason that I am excited about this is that I have recently been thinking about the chaos theory and writing. In a book called Living on the Edge of Chaos, I read that according to Jungian Philosophy, we live at that point between the past, a span of time we have passed through and subjected to our ordering interpretation, and the future—a great jumbled mass of unconnectedness(chaos). According to chaos theory, I have been told, there is a tendency in chaos, as reckoned in a lab, to formulate itself into some order. This they claim is because there are things called associational nodes, that cause random atoms to clump into ordered groups, these ordered groups attracted like minded material to join in them in patterns in a predetermined way. I think this is very much like the way that a silicon seed crystal lowered into a vat of molten silicon will cause all the molten silicon to form up into one large crystal with the exact configuration of the seed crystal.

I think that ideas that emerge in your mind have a similar way of calling forth similar information that is lying dormant in your mind.

So, I think it would be interesting to hear about some time that you went back to some locale that played a core role in your life.

Here follows my whack at this assignment:

Return to Sykesville 2003

When I go to back to Maryland, if I am not careful, Barbara Carbo will maneuver me into going by the house at 12 Narwood Ave. Barbara is one of those people who has an affinity for old houses—this in spite of the fact that she has lived in several of them. When she organizes our “little excursions” out to Sykesville, she does not include the houses that we lived in Catonsville and Ellicott City before we moved to Sykesville, even though they are right on the way—off Rolling Road and the Baltimore National Pike. Those were tract homes—new houses—the kind of houses that bore her.

I don’t argue with her about skipping the omitted houses. I am one of those people who feels a little guilty about having deserted a house or a neighborhood so I would prefer to go out of my way to avoid going down a street where I once lived. But, when you are visiting Barbara, you do what she wants to do, because she has such a curiosity about life.

This year when we visited Baltimore, they had had an exceptionally mild winter and a very wet spring so we could not spot our old house from Route 32. The foliage in the valley between our old house and the highway was so lush it hid even the tallest of the towers. In the winter time the house at 12 Narwood looms taller than the Methodist steeple and dominates the squinched up panorama that is Sykesville.

We decided to drive on past Sykesville and take the second turn off into town. That would give us a chance to come back down Main Street. Progress has come to the edge of town. There is a big rambling outcropping of new apartments. The old Westinghouse plant has been taken over by a new company.

When we drove down Main Street into town, we found that the narrow gulch that is downtown Sykesville has not changed all that much. A few more of the little shops that used to deal in the necessities of small towns, tractor parts, plumbing, and pertinent waving, had been taken over by antique shops and gift boutiques. The Old Post Office was no longer a restaurant, by the same name, as it had been a few years back. It was now an office of some sort. Law Office, I think it was. Right before the Train Station and the Patapsco River Bridge, we turned up School House Road passed the old grist mill. We began the ascent up Norwood Ave past where the old pallet mill that now stood deserted. The familiar ring of its big blades cutting through oak timbers now silenced.

On the left, the uphill side of Norwood, things looked pretty much like they always had until the familiar thicket of mixed maples and scrubby dogwoods opened up to reveal a wide lawn sweeping down from the Old Fowble House. Someone sneaked in in the five years since I had been back and completely restored the crumbling old gray house that had stood dark and empty in the midst of its thicket of trees. When we lived on Norwood thirty years back, that house gave every impression of having been neglected for so long that the weather blowing in through its broken windows would have rotted away its structural timbers long since. But, no. It’s sagging porches had been leveled, its siding was painted a happy yellow, and the ginger bread trim that graced its roof edges and the columns of it’s wide porch gleamed white.

Two doors further up the hill, there was a for sale sign hanging over the edge of the granite block retaining wall. This is what Barbara wanted me to see. Apparently the Mennonites who had bought the house two owners after us and painted the cedar shingles a pale ecru and the trim a formal maroon must have tired of the project.

Barbara wanted to drive up the driveway and see what they had done with the rest of the buildings and so we did. When you drive up the driveway at 12 Norwood Ave. You drive up! A forty-five degree angle wouldn’t be an exaggeration. It was too late in the year to catch the lilac hedge in bloom. The new people seem to have surrendered the lilacs to the invading honey suckle, but there was still that sense of going up into another world as you swing up and around by the ancient lilacs. And it does not seem like thirty years since we lived there. There is so much of this building in the collective psyche of our family. So much of it in the very marrow of my bones. It doesn’t make sense. We only lived there for a little over a year.

I am not tempted to call the realtor and find out what they are asking. I have no desire to go inside and walk again on the elegant maple floors of the formal downstairs rooms, to climb the grand curving stair, to see again the wide yellow pine planks of the upstairs floors or to go up the narrow higgledy pegeldy stairs that curve up and up through the tower rooms.

Ah, but the smell of honey suckle reminds me of fresh spring mornings and strolling along, cereal bowl in hand, up the path that curved up to our very own railroad spur that ran along the top of the property, collecting raspberries for breakfast as I went. From somewhere comes the scolding of a squirrel. I can’t make out where he is. Perhaps high in that black barked tree that I never knew the name of. Or, maybe it is that long ago squirrel that kept us company when we whiled away the warm summer afternoons on the wide front porch. Someone has chopped down his red maple tree. If there are still hammock rings on the front porch the poor old fellow is probably complaining that he no longer has that comfortable branch that used to reach over toward the porch on which to lounge and keep company with loafers lingered there.