The man who lives in the home I grew up in - the home my mother grew up in - the home my grandparents built - told my cousin Delphine (when she visited up here last month), that "...the garden grows best where the horse manure was, the horse the girl that used to live here had..." It was interesting to hear myself talked about in the abstract, second-hand, from my own cousin, from a man I had once met a couple of years ago myself, but have never known his name. He doesn't live in our old house anymore, telling my cousin that the house needs too much work and costs too much to heat, but he does putz around the place almost daily, and grows a garden on the land. I wonder what will eventually happen to the old place. The yard, and the woods beside it, will most likely, eventually, consume the house and outbuildings, as they fold themselves back into the ground from whence they came. Like so many abandoned buildings and cities, it will be as if they never were. How fleeting it all is, and how humbling...only existing, in the memories of those of us still alive...
