The Sadness of Places
Date Thursday, March 28, 2024 - 11:08 AM PST
Topic Experiences


I first began to understand the sadness of places when I was 10 years old. I was riding in the car with my parents; sharing the back seat with my grandma (who incidentally in her 70-some years never learned to drive) and watching the scenery go by. This was about ten years before the monoculture totally moved into the small city with huge Wal-Marts and Meijers on every corner, but the seeds of it were already showing. As the Krogers, Sunocos, and cookie-cutter suburbs passed by the window my grandma suddenly became very quiet. It was my dad who finally picked up on her thoughts, and broke the silence. “Sure does look a lot different these days, doesn’t it?” he posed. My grandma was very close to tears. In a broken voice she related that when she was a freshly married young woman the Krogers and Sunocos were nothing but wide open fields, where she and my grandpa would visit to get away from the city and enjoy a walk or a picnic. My grandpa was gone; and so were the places they used to visit. Soon, she would be gone as well.

Somehow in this moment my brain grasped for the first time in my life what it meant to grow old, what it meant to lose things that were once important to you.  Suddenly I felt the entire weight of her sadness bearing down on me, and the selfish thought entered my mind that someday I would experience and fully understand it too.  That is the sadness of places.

I still think of my grandma quite a bit these days.  She has been dead for almost 10 years now.  I have very few pictures of her immediately available, and sometimes when I try to remember what her face looked like I find it hard to recall.  And yet, when I think of my grandma’s house there is not a single detail I can’t recall.  I drew the entire floor plan from memory one day on a napkin in a bar, just to see if it was true.  I remember rubbing my fingers over the dime from 1936 that my grandpa set into the cement base of the front door when he built the house.  I remember the pattern on the linoleum floor in the kitchen that I used to trace with my feet and the smell of my grandma’s old peculator brewing coffee.  I remember her giant bed in a room with lilac walls and what seemed like hundreds of Avon perfume bottles reflecting light onto every surface.  I think of that house as I remember it, and realize that it does indeed still physically exist today.  But it will never exist as it does in my memory; I will never see it that way again.  That is the sadness of places.

Sometimes at night I pace the hallways of our 100-year-old house, and I think of all the people and all the lives and events that have passed through the very place I am standing.  I see the housing developments creeping in on the country land I used to run wild on as a child.  I tell myself that places cannot remain constant.  Places must come and go, just as people must come and go from our lives.  Yet to think of the people who have passed through my life, never to return, is too much of a sadness for me to bear.  The places will always be there, even if they are reduced to just bare earth.  But in my heart I know the places without the people will never be the same, and I feel a familiar weight in my chest. That is the sadness of places.



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