Walking Into a Memory

It's an odd feeling being somewhere from your past. It's an even odder feeling when that place is only a shell of what it was from your memory. This weekend, I visited my great grandparents' house. I faintly remember them living there. We used to spend most Independence Days there since my great grandfather's birthday was the fourth of July. We would always make him one of those flag cakes with strawberry slices as the stripes and blueberries as the stars. My cousins, siblings, and I would spend the day running around the yard and eating green apples off the apple trees. We were warned that eating green apples would give us stomachaches but we did it anyway. Sometimes we would take rides in the tractor and I always got to sit on the front hood over the motor.

The house was empty for a while and then a family moved in for a few years; however, they let the house fall into shambles and now it looks as though no one has lived there for decades. Being there again after so long, I realized just how much I remembered spending time there, what it looked like, and how it was when my grandparents were there. When I walked through the kitchen, I could remember food being prepared at the counter and talk of my great grandmother's famous dried apple cake. When I walked through the empty living room, I could remember everyone sitting on the couch and watching the big, old TV--the kind that was a piece of furniture itself, four legs and all. Every room in the house was named for the color of the walls in that room - the pink room, the red room, the yellow room, and the purple room.

Sometimes when I see something old, I wonder what it was like when it was new. What was it's purpose? Why did it matter? Who it belonged to and what is their story? This is one of the few times that I knew the story, and it felt like walking back in time.