Parting Sans Sorrow...

I went to Rome today and had a wonderful Christmas visit with Kim, Phil, Cole, Christy, Oliver, Dexter, Jessica, Mason, Matt, and Kayley, it was a relaxed day that resonated with the laughter of four happy children.  It reminded me more than ever that Christmas is a children's holiday. It's a holiday that delights children, and that delight brightens the lives of everyone who stands in the presence of their joy.
   

I intended to go home when I left there, but something told me it wasn't time to go back to Marietta quite yet. So I  went by the cemetery to visit with Mom and Dad for a few moments--to tell them how proud I was of the kids, how happy everyone was, how much they'd love to see their great grandkids playing together. I thanked them for so many unforgettable Christmases, and for such a close, supportive family.
   

 After that, I drove past 3 Marchmont Drive and felt... nothing. What I saw was a house that has, in the year since Cole and Christy moved out, deteriorated to the point that it looks twenty years older. The yard was unkempt, the house in decline. The old Gresham house was missing siding, with silver insulation board showing in large sections. There were broken-down cars in the driveways and the yards. The old Gresham outbuilding that stood on the edge of my parents' yard had been torn down, but the broken pieces were scattered about like the aftermath of a disaster. It's as if the house--in fact, the entire neighborhood--had sustained only because of my parents unflagging will to better everything they touched, everyone they loved, then by Cole and Christy's youthful vitality and eagerness to share what they had loved about that home. As soon as those energies were gone, the house succumbed to the same entropy that has turned the rest of Paris Heights into a weary, uninviting assortment of homes--not a neighborhood or a community any longer.
 

But you know what? It didn't mean anything to me. I wasn't angry about it. I wasn't saddened by it. It's not my home any more. My old home is in photos, in the hundreds of stories that Kim and I tell, in the dreams that I often have in which we're all together in that warm, welcoming family room... and in my heart. This rundown house, occupied by strangers who take no pride in its appearance and who have no idea of the love that filled its walls for so long, is no longer home to anyone I know and no longer looks like a place I'd call home.
 

I then drove up Leon Street to see Gary Steele's old house. it's now an empty lot. Right after Mr. Steele died, the house mysteriously burned to the ground and now there's no sign that a house was ever there. It looked tranquil, with no sign of the family that had called it home for more than fifty years. And on the other side of Leon Street, the white fence was covered in spray-painted graffiti that no one cared about enough to paint over...

 

It used to bother me that my past was gradually fading away--West Rome High School (my alma mater) is a Walmart parking lot, East Rome High School (where I first taught) is a K-Mart parking lot, Candler's and Couch's and the West Rome Post Office are all gone. But now I realize that what I loved about West Rome always lives on in my mind and my heart, and what's there has no emotional attachment to me any longer. Its detritus piled upon my past, and my only connection to it is that it exists atop something that I still remember and love...
   

It was a sort of good feeling, really; it was a sense of acceptance, a break with the past.

West Rome is the place I once knew, and parts of it--Coosawattee, Coker Estates, some of the homes off Burnett Ferry--look quite inviting still. But most of it just goes to prove to me that nothing gold can last...