You can’t go home again
“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”- Thomas Wolfe
Fans of the Hallmark series “The Way Home” see time-traveling characters talking about whether they can change the past and whether going there is an addiction that keeps them from living in the present. I like the series and the fact that it suggests to some of us that we can’t go home again and need to stop trying to do so.
Our family lived in this Tallahassee, Florida house from the 1950s through the 1980s. The first thing I notice when I Google the address is the ugly driveway that takes up a fair amount of the front yard. From pictures posted by a subsequent owner, I notice that the kitchen and dining room have been combined in an attempt to make the home modern; one of the kitchen windows has been covered over.
A look at neighborhood maps confirms what I worried about when I was young: the wonderful woods behind the house have been turned into an upscale neighborhood. The homes look expensive and less desirable than the woods where we played.
All of our former neighbors have moved away. My 1954 Chevy no longer sits in front of the garage door. In fact, the room is no longer a garage, but an office. The memories remain even though the changes to the house obscure the past to those of us who once lived there. I resent the changes to the house because they don’t fit a late 1940s home.
Now you see why I can’t go home again: home is no longer there. Even the huge azalea and camelia bushes have been torn out.
