a look back

Yesterday I was riding my sea foam green bicycle down the hill by the church, hanging a hard right at the bottom while trying my darndest not to hit the gravel and go skidding across the rode on my side, thus busting the cute star-shaped button on the cuff of my white shorts while gashing my right thigh deep enough to leave a permanent scar.  Pardon me, I think I got ahead of myself.  That part with the button and the scar didn't happen until later, the day everyone was boarding the old brown bus for church camp.  But that's not my point.  And then again, it is.

Because wasn't it yesterday that I lay in bed, window open, listening to a chorus of deep-throated bullfrogs sing me to sleep while the water cooler blew its damp breath through our house by the creek?  Surely just yesterday that I climbed the giant live-oak tree with the long, low limb I loved to walk along?  Because if it wasn't yesterday that I watched Nanny make a peach cobbler, or listened to the cicadas raise their mind-numbing racket in the trees, or sang "throw out the lifeline" or "whosoever will may come" from my spot in the second pew from the front, then when was it?  Not 50+ years ago; not possible.  For in so many ways that matter, I am still that child scuffing along in the rocky dirt of Salado, stirring up doodlebugs and pining with the mourning dove, bound to that place and time by ties that bind and will not break.

In reality, my brother, sister and I no longer have physical ties there. Since Mom has moved, our pilgrimages to Salado will inevitably end, and it will become a nostalgic spot along the interstate that I will crane to see while passing by.  And just as well, perhaps, for the places and the people that played so prominently in my recollections are gone, or much changed.  The halcyon town of my 1950's childhood exists now in pictures and stories and misty-edged memories.  But more than memories.  This place along the creek- its sounds and smells, its textures, the way the hot Texas sun shimmered off of it and thinned the blue of its sky- is part of me as if a third parent, adding its dusty code to my own hereditary material.  

It is realistic to say that I stand at a point in life when the look back is considerably longer than the one ahead.  And yet, when I contemplate the long line of yesterdays that comprise my life, it sometimes seems I am just the young girl on the sea foam green bike, in a place of joy, racing for the fork in the road and hoping to make the right turn without falling.  A missing star button and faded scar, but altogether a most wonderful ride.