Redtree Times

The Elevating Eye— At West End Gallery

That’s why we feel so disoriented, irritated even, when these touchstones from our past are altered. We don’t like it when our hometown changes, even in small ways. It’s unsettling. The playground! It used to be right here, I swear. Mess with our hometown, and you’re messing with our past, with who we are. Nobody likes that.

–Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss (2008)

Everyone’s hometown changes over time. Some wither and slowly dwindle away. Some burn to the ground or are washed away by floods. Some prosper and grow. But even in the best-case scenario of these, they all change in ways that veer from the memory of that place that was formed while growing up there, at a time when we were younger and more carefree. We were more preoccupied with the desires contained in the moment and less concerned about the future.

And less likely to notice that change was already beginning to take place.

Change is the nature of things. And even those changes that we see as being good or beneficial often have that same unsettling feeling when it affects the picture of the past we have formed in our memory.

Maybe this is because this divergence causes us to question whether what we believed to be true then was really true. Or maybe it is just that the changes that occur in our hometowns remind us of the changes that are taking place in ourselves as we age, some good and some definitely not so good. The changes that took place in your 20-year-old self over time is very unsettling to your 60-year-old self.

Things change. In ourselves. In our hometowns. In our nation and the world.

We are going through a change right now in this nation that certainly is unsettling and disorienting, one that veers wildly from our memory of what it was before. I would like to say that it is just part of those changes that occur naturally, that we are just unrealistically holding on to an idealized past.

Unfortunately, it is not. It is an unnatural attempt to rewrite our memories of the past and take away our future. To take away our hope and make us desperately subservient, turning us into sharecroppers and serfs.

I hate writing this and am going to stop now. It always hurts to see your hometown– or country– deteriorate, leaving you with only a memory of what you once thought it was.

Here’s this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s from Iris Dement and the song is Our Town. Its lyrics have been rumbling around in my head for a while now. They are certainly on point for this post:

I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall
I bring them flowers about every day
But I just gotta cry when I think what they’d say

If they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast
And just like they say nothing good ever lasts
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye but hold on to your lover
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town
Goodnight

Even so, I have hope for our town, but the window is closing fast. I’m not ready to give up on our town…