Ghosts

Lately, I've been surrounded by ghosts. Not the white sheeted apparitions that go boogety boo, but the whispers of yesterday that sometimes shout.

This weekend, for instance, my mother's side of the family had a reunion of sorts. The location was my mother's elementary school. To get there, one has to travel past all the places that were a part of my everyday as a kid. As I drive by my old house, my grandmother's old house (there is no house, my cousin lives on the property, but I can still see it if I look just right), by the non existent store (Wheatley's) that was turned into a storage shed for a repair shop, past the grocery store where my mother never had to show her driver's license to cash a check, I hear the whispers of all those memories. I can see glimpses of how I used to spend my time in my room in that old house, where the spring was by the back right corner of the house, when the car slid off the upper road over the hill that winter it was slick as snot. The bad memories fight for their turns to be heard, but mostly the good ones win. But even when they shout, they are still just whispers.... I can't touch them. Many of the buildings are gone. The old schoolhouse... .Man... so hard to believe as I walked in that I had my baby shower for Cory there twenty years ago. My grandmother had her 70th birthday party there around that same time, maybe even that same year... and she's been gone so long. The times we traveled those same roads to visit with family out on the ridge. To drink from the dipper cup... the coldest well water with a tang of metal. To smell the foods that they loved to cook... beans, potatoes, cornbread, ramps, things I have never wanted to taste but love to smell cooking. These things are threads in the fabric of my life. (Cue the corny Cotton Commercial soundtrack). Nothing has stayed the same. Everything changed. I just have to keep remembering it and looking forward. Because if I just dig my feet in to make time stop, I'll never know what joys are around the corner. And from the memories that are rushing around in my head, I just know there are more to come.