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?

The Varied World

 "I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life admidst it's perils." Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

 The gray dreary weather has me feeling closed in today, but I've been trying to get out in the few dry moments with good friends, or just a camera, to capture the beauty that is still there, just a bit damp.