Echos of the Past

This was an interesting week for me, one where my childhood and youth peeked out to remind me of people, places, and events of what feel like a lifetime ago. Social media provides opportunities never before had for people disconnected for decades to reconnect, either intentionally through searching out, or quite bite accident. Imagine my surprise when clicking around the various blog sites, and following links and recommendations to others, that I should click and open a blog featuring a face so familiar, yet I couldn't put a name to the face. I read the post, a detailed account of her latest retro sewing attempt, and it clicked. Here was a girl I knew 35 plus years ago from 4-H. Back when I was young the county that I lived in was mostly rural, unlike the sprawling suburbs so much of it is now. Farms have been sold over the last generation and in their place are housing communities know as Dairy Acres, or We No Longer Grow Corn Farms.

Sue was from a fairly affluent; at least I thought so then, farm family from the other side of the county. I would hang out with her, and groups of others, at the county fair and other county wide youth events. She usually earned the blue and champion ribbons, or was one leading the meeting or the youth group. I sent a private message her way, explained my surprise in finding her. In a short couple e-mail exchanges over the week, I learned her family was not the rich farmers she knew everyone thought they were. (This isn't how she said it, but my realization.) The farm crisis of the 80's hit her family hard, and while they fared better than many, her parents had a difficult time of it. None of her siblings wanted to take over the farm, and her parents eventually sold a lot of the land, though the house and buildings are still there. She joked that they weren't now millionaires, but her mom recently started a weekly cleaning service. "Sure," she typed, "She gets a cleaning service after I leave the house." Their land hasn't been built on yet, but she suspects to drive by the field she used to run horses, will soon be a block of town houses. We have friended each other on Facebook,and promised to look each other up the week of the county fair. She has kids that are involved in 4 H and they are winning blue ribbons as she used to.

For nostaliga purposes, I took a drive out past the home I grew up in. While we didn't have a large multigenerational farm, the memories of horses, and pigs, and digging weeds, and hosting 4 H events flooded me. The old barns are all gone, replaced with a sprawling manicured lawn. The gorgeous but over grown lilac bushes, in which my sisters and I would crawl into when we were very little to play house, that used to line two sides of the front end of the property, have all been removed. New bushes, better maintained, and starting to grow full, have taken their place. Like Sue's, no one in my family wanted to live out in the country, so didn't buy the house from my parents. It looked like the family living there has a lot of love and care for the old place. There were still a few other families I remember living out that direction. While rural, we had sort of a spread out neighborhood. The families that still were there were the young families in my childhood, where I was on the tail end of a large family, so my parents were decades older. The young couples I used to babysit for are now retiree's, with their children having children of their own. I smiled though driving past my mom's friend’s house on my way back to town. Jeannie and my mom had gone to high school together, and grew up to find they are living half a mile away to raise their families together. At 88, she is still in her own home, a widow for over 20 years.

I have hopefully many more decades, God willing, to keep making memories. I hear my own kids talking about their childhood with a bit of the nostalgic bent already. It is fun to remember people and places that helped form who I am today.