Endings

I love this place, this corner of "forgottonia" where my family has lived for five generations. When I revisit the long gray stretches of winter fields with bins and bare trees silhouetted in the afternoon light, when night falls and I drive home with the black miles around me and distant strings of orange or yellow farmstead lights necklaced across the horizon, I feel grounded in a way that no other place duplicates. There is a steadiness and rhythm here: spring into summer into fall into winter into spring, again--with the same changes of foliage and sky. The earth changes its clothes, but it is the same earth, the same body underneath. This is a most comforting thing.

But on the human level, there is profound change and decay. My brother and I paused on our walk today (a short one, due to a bitter wind) to examine an old sign post just down from my mother's house. It stands sturdily, but embraced by a young tree's branches. Grass has totally overtaken the corner the signs once marked. Not long before my parents moved our family back to this area, authorities closed the train crossing which gave the corner purpose, choosing to maintain only two ways across the tracks that split the village in half. A good move, and one I appreciate, as it hugely diminished traffic past the house that would become our home. But in the years after the move, we watched that bit of abandoned road turn to grass and disappear before our eyes.

We also watched a house just down the road move from habitation to collapse. Soon after moving to the area, my sister and I met a blond boy with a dog named Oreo who lived in that house. After a while the boy and his family moved away. Eventually the front porch door hung open over sturdy red steps. We could see holes under the eaves. Now nothing remains but a pile of rubble topped, last I noticed, with a bit of the peak of the roof. Around here, you can watch a house and road disappear bit by bit, year by year, right in front of your eyes.

From the kitchen window, I look across the field to a ruin of bricks around one tall, definitive chimney--my grandfather and my mother's old high school. Swifts live in the chimney, flying from it to grace periwinkle evenings with their twittering songs and little paddling wings. From Mom's front porch--the part of the house facing the village rather than the fields, I see the shell of my grandparents' church, looming above the neighbor's little house. In earliest memories of visits to my grandparents', I vaguely recall a dim, high-ceilinged interior with big wooden chairs on a dais. My mother remembers that a cat once wandered in during a service and sat in the wooden chair reserved for the pastor. He, being a cat-lover, simply chose the chair beside it and let the cat enjoy its seat.

I don't know where I'm going with this post. Perhaps it is the melancholy of knowing my visit to western Illinois draws to a close--but I feel this evidence in front of my eyes (I've grown up with this evidence) that the lives we build and the things we build don't necessarily last. The seasons with their beauty and trouble will roll around again, but maybe not for us, maybe not for us in this place . . .