Craic
The drive to Cape May isn’t a difficult one, unless you can’t stand to sit in traffic even for a little bit. From where I live it’s a series of straight shots for 40/50 miles separated by only a few left and right turns, the end result being a different world than where I came from.
But then….where did I come from?
There’s this song by a musician named Kina Grannis that I think about from time to time called “For Now”
Sometimes I think about the ones that we’ve replaced
All the millions underneath the burnt and waste.
And I get sad because of course we’ll be the same
All of history collapsing in it’s wake.
Oh, maybe it’s enough that I have laid here.
Maybe it’s enough that I have known inside my head and..
Maybe it’s enough to know that we were here together
And that we are the ones, we are the ones
We are the ones, for now.
One of the things I note along the route as I get closer and closer to the beach are the farms, running or otherwise, but especially the old houses. Seemingly ancient colonial brick farm houses, same as you’d see just about anywhere on the east coast, windows boarded up. The ones that have front porches won’t have them for much longer it seems. And because of my keen sense of longing and attachment to anything that has a memory, I feed on those even as I pass for just a moment.
Thinking about the hands that laid those bricks, the likely smell of tobacco off the front porch as a farmer takes an afternoon sit between work. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, late night drinking, holiday celebrations. Dead of summer or covered in snow. The texture of the glass that used to occupy those windows, the feeling of spring air breezing through the screen door as the smells of the kitchen waft through the house. A comfy bed upstairs, as comfy as you could get those days, waking up a little earlier on a Sunday per the routine.
Dogs, cats, horses, chickens, the responsibilities that come with each of those things. It all floods my senses as I breeze by. By the time it fades away I pass another now dormant house, once the only home some people have probably ever known.
Long is the list of people on this earth that lived in one or maybe two houses in their lives, knowing every inch from memory. Layers of paint and wallpaper that, at this point, probably provides an extra percentage of insulation in the winter time.
I’ve moved roughly 14 times in my life, 7 of which with my parents before venturing out with my now ex-wife, and then on my own. It was the nature of how we lived, between my dad’s specific career and other factors, none of which I hold any grudge towards whatsoever, it was just the way our life was.
Then I think sometimes, about those houses on route 47, and then my own. The few of them that no longer exist.
The stone farm house I was born in was torn down years ago, the land owned by a company unable and unwilling to put the money out to preserve it, one of the oldest still standing farm houses in Pennsylvania if memory serves correct.
The 4th house on the list, where we lived when I was 8-11, is still there. Another farm house with modern additions put on, but a quarter of it is now missing. An addition that was put on before we lived there and then torn off again years after we left.
The next two houses, Northern New Jersey and then back in Southeast PA, are completely gone. Both the result of the landowners selling off property and the new owners un-interested in having a house even exist there anymore.
Perhaps one day I’ll write about them individually, the memories and such from each.
Another time.
I heard that someday when they look up at the night
They’ll see nothing but a black and starless sky.
And they’ll tell stories of some old and callow time
Claiming spectacles of brilliant burning lights
I can’t quite put my finger on my viewing of time in this way, how birth and decay are all a constant, but maybe that’s why. I’ve lived a life full to the brim of acceptance of what is, and therefore forced to acknowledge all the aspects of the lifespan of a person/place/thing in order to mourn properly. Someone close to me does the same thing but he tends to take a different angle now that he’s older, choosing to mourn through grief and focus on what was lost more so than the gratefulness of it’s existence in the first place, which is where I land.
Because, why be sad? Why do all of the happy memories make you upset that you won’t create more?
What strange greed is this?
Besides, there’s plenty in the world and our own minds to make us sad on a regular basis. Those should be counteracted by these memories, not enhanced.
Recently I was blessed with the ability to travel to Iceland and Greenland, by way of a handful of airplanes and an explorer ice-breaker ship with National Geographic.
In those moments, out at sea and then hiking trail-less landscapes up the gaps in the mountains adjacent to massive fjords, with rivers of melted ice cap running down through, I found these feelings also. The same from the mortar of homes now gone, and floorboards yet to be tread on.
These feelings in all these seemingly small things, as well as the big sweeping things, can be the same.
Magic in every second.
Never out of reach just sometimes out of perspective.
The truth that there is no glory to achieve that’s worth the toil you must fork into a “life”.
Life isn’t about glory….
…every single day in every single detail and all the space in between….
………life is for living this exact moment right here. Then the next one, and the one after that.
Grateful for what is and not afraid of what comes next.
No matter where your feet are planted and no matter where you keep your stuff.
Dig it.
-Bones
DNSG
we had family for many years in Avalon, just down the road. And if you haven't seen it Avalon (the movie) so echoes everything you've written in this piece.