Former US Poet Laureate Ada Limon recently wrote in Alta about her experience moving back to her California hometown after 30 years. Not only to the Sonoma valley where she grew up, but to the house where she lived from six months to age fifteen.
As someone who also moved back—in my case returning to my hometown on the Canadian prairie after 40 years in Southern California—I can relate. There’s a strange sense of things being simultaneously old and new, memories once distant coming vividly to life. Roaring back and insinuating themselves on the present.
Limon says that after writing at least 100 poems about her childhood place, it now feels like she’s living inside one of her poems. “Where I used to point to pages, I can now point, in real time, to the places that made me,” she writes. “This might be the very definition of the lyrical present. The poem has happened but is also happening now.”
I feel that about my life now: it has happened, but now that I’m back in the place where it all started, there’s a sense of it still happening. Three years in, I’m still driving around the city and remembering. The trendy late-night gathering spot on Main Street is now a dental clinic. The breakfast place now a medical clinic.
Last week I was walking with a friend and he pointed out a four-story mixed-use building with metal siding. “That’s where the Zoo used to be.” His mention of the Zoo, a raucous bar where a bunch of us hung out, prompted us both to launch into a chorus of “remember whens.” From a time in the 70s when we lived in a rambling old house on Corydon with other roommates.
My contribution: “I remember when we trudged through thigh-high snow in a blizzard to get to the Zoo. We were determined that winter was not going to keep us from having a good time.” Initially, with this friend, there were a lot of “remember whens.”
We met at a fast-food job back in our teens, and had many excellent adventures before moving on to our respective life paths five years later. The past is taking up much less room in our lunch conversations these days as the present takes center stage. But it still pops up occasionally, those memories from the soup of our lives.
They say memories are tied to the senses. The smell of your first lover. The sound of your tinkling jewelry box. The feeling of a spring breeze on your skin. For me, memories are often triggered by the sight of a place. And the times when I’m most prone to going down memory lane are when I’m driving.
In Southern California, my memories only went back to my early twenties. After four decades, I’d accumulated a lot of them: college, marriage, working as a reporter, friends and relationships. But I was not prone to nostalgia. I moved forward, not back. Always busy trying to survive and create something: a life. Plus, the urban setting changed so fast, grinding away under the forces of gentrification, that there were few memories to hang on to.
But now that I’m back in my hometown, my memories go all the way back. To when I was a baby living in a cramped two-bedroom house with five other family members, a young girl walking to school, a sullen and rebellious teenager, an English major carrying a Norton anthology, a raging punk rocker.
I’ve never been one to dwell in the past, and I still have an eye on the future. The blizzard of memories that hit me full force when I first moved back has given way to flurries. They add context and texture to my life.
I was reminded of the sensation of suddenly being surrounded by memories when my childhood best friend recently moved back. We were besties from Grade 1 to the end of high school. Although our hair is now gray and our faces a bit wrinkled, I like to think we still contain our essential essence, supplemented by all the experiences and wisdom accumulating from decades of living.
Over lunch, I realize that my former best friend is in that same sense of exuberant remembering as I was three years ago. In particular, she’s lamenting what happened to our junior high school. I remember obsessing about exactly the same thing when I first moved back.
Driving by Deer Lodge Junior High on my way to the gym, it hurt to see the place where I’d gathered specimens in the nearby creek to study under the microscope, where I’d played basketball in a maroon uniform emblazoned with a white deer’s head, shuttered and fallen into disrepair.
Designed by Smith Carter Katelnikoff, the architectural firm responsible for dozens of Winnipeg schools and other civic buildings in the postwar period, Deer Lodge Junior High School opened to much fanfare in 1957. Closed in 1983 due to declining enrollment, it’s served as a computer education center, temporary school for a displaced First Nation, and provincial offices after the school division sold it in 2010. It’s been empty for years now, part of the liminal space, prairie grass growing tall around its foundation, graffiti marring its once-new stucco.
Part of my obsession was trying to figure out what happened to the bronze sculpture of a leaping deer that was placed in front of the school in 1967 to mark Canada’s centennial. I still haven’t found out, but I hope it sits in storage somewhere and wasn’t melted down for reuse.
I used to think there were two kinds of people: those who stayed rooted to where they were planted, and those who left. Now I see that there’s a third category: those who left and returned, coming full circle back to where the story began, to where they belong.