It's almost like watching a favorite old movie for the first time in many years. You know all the scenes, and all the lines. You know the actors and the outcome. Something approaching deja vu, but not quite, because while the scenes and characters are familiar and the same, the effect they bring about is now distorted through the lens of time.
That's a bit of the feeling I have had, moving back to my home town.
It's kind of funny, because it's not like I was gone a long time. Only a year and a half. But the town I moved back to is not the town I left when I moved out after my marriage fell apart. It is more like the town I left when I moved away for college twenty four (gulp) years ago. Wait. That's not right. A quick consultation with my calculator tells me that it has been more than twenty seven (bigger gulp) years since I left for college. But I digress. What I am trying to relate is that I not only moved back to town, I moved back in time.
This came to me as I was walking around town one evening, no kids at home and nothing better to do than get some fresh air and exercise under the starry sky. That's when the movie metaphor hit me, it almost felt like I was on a set; same streets, same sky, same houses, even some of the same characters, but a different time. It reminded me of when I was a teen, walking or riding my bike on these same streets under the same sky. Going to or from my job at the Inn in town or a friend's house. The buildings are still there but the friends are gone, most of them any way. And those that stayed or returned, like me, are now different people. Aged and distorted like one of those time lapse effects in a show on Discovery or National Geographic; a bud springs from a dormant patch of earth or a seemingly dead branch on a tree, and quickly it explodes in size and color like a fourth of July firework. Just as quickly ( and also like those fireworks) the colors fade from the petals as they first wither and droop and then they fall away.
I feel lucky. I feel like possibly, this is the sequel to that favorite old movie, the rare sequel that's better than the original. The second segment in the flower time lapse; after the beautiful but short lived flower has dried and blown away. If I'm lucky, it's the part where fruit is born and seeds are sewn and a new cycle/sequel begins. Same earth. Same tree. Same Place. But a new seed, a new flower, a new fruit, a new life in a new time. But it feels like an old time.
-epilog-
Maybe you can tell from the change in tone midway through this post, but I had started it late last Fall right after I moved back and didn't get to finish, so I decided to come back to it now; and the result is a bit uneven. I think what I was originally going for was an attempt to convey the surreal aspect of moving back to my hometown, the same yet different, and how it felt like so much time had passed when in reality it was a lot of life that had passed during only a brief time. When I began writing again I jumped (maybe a little too hard) on the movie metaphor, milking it so hard as to obscure the original thought. Oh well.
Coincidentally if not ironically (always easy to mix or confuse them) Vermont native Jay Craven was in town just recently filming a few scenes for an upcoming movie "Northern Borders" based on the great book by Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher. Kind of a coming of age story of a boy on his grandparents farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. (Craven also produced "Where the Rivers Flow North" and "A Stranger in theKingdom" both also based on books by Mosher.) Kinda cool. It was filmed at the train station just down the street from my childhood home, where I spent a lot of time, sold a lot of lemonade to the tourists, conductors and the engineer of the train and risked derailing the train every time we placed a penny on the track to see it get flattened.
Peace to the Planet...
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