Retracing

 "Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In my lifetime so far, I've lived many places. Until recent years there was never much retracing, once we left a place, it stayed frozen in memory exactly as it was. 

Going back to places frozen this way feels like moving inside a photograph, surreal. 

 Many years ago my family lived on a small college campus in Missouri. The college recently shut down, merging with a larger one nearby. Now the campus stands empty, one of the only things largely unchanged from my memory.

Other than the absence of my house, even the outline of it erased by lush grass, and of an entire street of little white houses, eerie and abandoned even then. We used to love to sneak into them, and wonder at the lives of their occupants

I wonder what the world now will look like when painted by memory?