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| Buy Here |
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| A Young Greendale, City Hall |
Nostalgia comes from memories and our minds burgeon with them, overflow onto our current visual space (writers use these for their stories, and anything else that one can find in the larder :D). As we gather new memories, we merge them with the old.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately of the
town where I grew up. It was one of the greenbelt projects FDR initiated during
the Depression. We lived in the Greendale community.
It put men to work, building a country
hamlet with the amenities of a city. The people who lived there had to make a
certain income. My dad was short by a few dollars. He had someone vouch for
him.
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| Greendale Theatre, Only 10¢ for Sat matinee |
We had a grocery store, a Five & Dime
(run by two harridan spinsters), drug store, theatre, dentist and doctor offices. When
mom took me to the doctor for a smallpox vaccination, I didn’t cry, so the
doctor inoculated me again. The nurse was a big boned woman who walked all over
town, visiting homes and administrating cough syrups. Her hair was stone grey
in a thick braid that she wound around her head. Even as a young child, the
town’s nurse made an impression on me.
There was a public school, grades
kindergarten to 12, police department, a tavern called the Village Inn,
with a bus line into the city, and churches scattered throughout. It was a good place to grow up.
I’d walk outside into the cool breezes and
smell fresh grass clippings, raise my head and listen to robin’s song. When
the summer nights were gentle, our windows would be open. As dawn lit the
bedroom, robins began their day. It was a balm to my ears and I’d sigh. I’d be
reminded life was good. My parents protected me and kept me safe.
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| New houses, New streets, New everything |
I’d explore with my brothers over rutted
paths with puddles from last night’s passing shower. If I were a pioneer and
thirsty, I could drink from the puddle to survive a long trek across country. Tommy would point and yell, “Let’s
explore that field over there. Maybe, there’s hidden treasure.”
We ran up a hill where a big tree had
fallen over, branches and bracken tucked about. It made a good fort. My
brothers settled in with their boy scout knives and began to form swords, bows
and arrows while I pretended to work in the kitchen, the old tree stump being
my countertop.
Later, after we moved from Greendale, new
memories joined with the old.
When I see fluttering wings of butterflies,
it reminds me of the bright afternoon when, in a moment of quiet serenity, thousands
of monarch butterflies blanketed our backyard, resting before they started
again on their migration. I can still feel the hot sun on my shoulders as I
stared out the back door. I did not move, afraid I might jar them into flight.
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| Greendale today |
I went to my son’s room where he had just
been put down for a nap but he was asleep. I could not rouse him. When I
returned to the back door, the butterflies were gone.
Nostalgia can give you a nice afternoon,
away from the thunder of violence that seems to have pervaded our world these
days. It’s like a good book. We can escape into past memories for a while but
we don’t want to get lost. When the story in the book says, The End, we close
the book. We reenter the world of our lives that can be tumultuous, difficult,
and far away from our sweet memories.
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Many thanks to my memories, & WikiCommons, Public Domain
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