06.15.09
Posted in Life at 5:05 pm by Jan
Not sure if this will have a software morale like most of my blogs, but twice recently I heard the old adage “you can’t go home again.” I disagree.
Some years ago my sister Kathy and I were doing our yearly drive through the neighborhood and past the home we grew up in. It’s one of our favorite pastimes when I visit her in Salt Lake City. But this time she suddenly said “let’s knock on the door and look in.” My parents had sold the house twenty years prior as part of their divorce (after 30 years of marriage). It had been a traumatic time for both of us and we hadn’t seen the inside of the house since. So we gathered our courage, went to the door and rang the doorbell. A young woman opened the door. Kathy took one look inside and seeing the living room look exactly like it did when we last saw it, she started to cry. The woman assumed we’d been in a car accident or other mishap but I said no, we’d grown up there and Kathy was just overwhelmed to see it again. The girl said “You’re Kathy and Janet! I grew up with you! Come in!” She and her mother showed us all through the house. Everything was perfectly maintained and looked exactly the same as it had – even the mural of Monument Valley that was painted on the front room wall was still beautifully the same. In the back yard she took us over to the tetherball pole my father had made – a tire filled with cement with iron pole in the middle and ring at the top for the tetherball rope to hook onto. In the cement were small handprints and our names, which we’d written into the wet cement. “See” the woman said. “I always knew Kathy and Janet had lived here.”
This month my trip to visit my sister coincided with our ward house’s 100 year anniversary. Seeing everyone who were the neighborhood kids going to church together who were now the older generation. But even though we hadn’t seen each other for many, many years, it felt like we’d never left the neighborhood. Seeing Shirlene who’d lived across the street and who I’d first met before I started school. We reminisced doing our “Folly Dolly Girls” performance on our front porch one warm summer night. Kathy had “produced” it, made us ride our bikes with advertising billboards and sell tickets. All the neighbors came and mom passed out lemonade and cookies. Seeing Dale who lived down the street and we were best friends for years. Rosemary and Linda who I’d met in Kindergarten walked together to school almost every day from elementary school through high school. It didn’t feel like there had been years between our time together even though many of us hadn’t kept in touch. Friendship. Amazing.
So I think you CAN go home again. Strong connections to people and places withstand even long separations. The love remains.
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