“Can you go home again?”
By
Gerry Niskern
Are you going back to your birthplace this summer?
Thomas Wolfe warned that “you can’t go home again” but most of us try anyway, don’t we?
I had two childhood homes. I lived in West Virginia the first ten years of my life but finished growing up in Phoenix. The first home was a little farm in the beautiful hills of West Virginia and the second was a wonderful old house with a big front porch a block from the Arizona state capitol.
A few years ago, in September, I went home again.
We drove the country roads through the beautiful green hills of West Virginia, and this time I was the resident historian! I recalled stories of our farmhouse that was still there, but voiced my sadness that the rasberry vines and peach, plum and cherry orchards are gone.
. My childhood home in Phoenix no longer exists. The block was razed in order to build a State Highway Dept. building. Other wiser, states have preserved the stately older homes around their capitols.
My grade school in West Virgina was still there, out in the country and going strong. First thru 8th grades rode the school bus together to Limestone School. It was a long, long day for a first grader who had not had a kindergarten to attend . I don’t think my older sister ever forgave me for having to sit with me at lunch while I cried from homesickness. She was the pitcher for the fifth grade and as she reminded me, “my team is waiting for me!”
In Phoenix, my new grade school was Jackson on 21st Ave between Madison and Jackson. At the nine A. M. bell, everyone stopped wherever they were on the playground or on the street arriving, and said the pledge of allegiance as the flag was raised. Jackson is gone. Nothing is there now but a pile of rubble and the lone flagpole.
Fairview, my tiny West Virginia country church, still holds services. It was such a wonderful interlude to sit on the front steps and look out over the green valley below while the memories flooded in.
Back then the children sang and recited on Sundays. The altar was covered with canning jars filled with daisies, roses, lilacs, and wild flowers brought by farm children. I’ll never forget the Easter Sunday the Jones twins were supposed to sing “Jesus Loves Me” as rehearsed. When they took the stage they belted out “You are my Sunshine”, complete with good, old West Virginia style yodeling. That was the day the choir director resigned.
The church of my Phoenix childhood, Capitol Methodist, on West Van Buren, had rousing Sunday night sings. That church building is gone too.
So, yes, Mr. Wolfe, sometimes you actually can go home again! But, at other times, you just have to visit those visions you hold dear in your heart!
Sad about Jackson school. Good memories going there. I am home after a wonderful trip.
A few years ago I went to the town where I lived for the first 15 years of my life. Gerry knows the town well, since it is the town her mother and father lived in as well. It wasn’t the same as when I lived there, but the memories came to me as I went around visiting relatives and seeing the places I knew from those first 15 years. My memories brought laughter and happiness, but some brought sadness and even tears. It was only 15 years, but they were full of life in a small town in West Virginia.