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Slim Randles' Home Country
Summer ponderings and ghosts
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[JULY
15, 2006]
Two kids were arguing just outside my window the other
day. Now that school's out, they have more time for the important
issues of life, of course. This time, the subject was ghosts and
whether or not they are real. |
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People my age have to plead guilty to the capital crime of having
gray hair and therefore aren't qualified to participate in such
weighty matters. But if they had asked me, they might have been
surprised. Of course there are ghosts. We're surrounded by them.
Maybe they aren't scary or grab you from behind, but they are ghosts
just the same. See that rusting tank on the edge of town? That's all
that's left from when George Dodson started that tannery back in the
1920s. He was doing all right then, until the Great Depression came
along, and George and the steel tank became ghosts -- a part of our
history, but still somehow here with us, still a part of what makes
this community our home.
Just up Lewis Creek a mile are the sloping concrete walls of what
used to be a dairy. As kids, we'd sneak over -- quietly, so we
didn't spook the cows -- and watch the men milking. The huge
Holsteins walked in from force of habit like animated milk
factories, which they were. Seems like there should be something
someone could do with that old milking barn. Now it's just hard to
go by and see the weeds thickening around it as it lies there in the
unrelenting sun and cracks to pieces.
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Down on Main Street is the old ice cream store where we used to
go the very first time we had nerve enough to ask a girl to go with
us. We'd bite the ends off the drinking straw covers, dip the
remaining ends in chocolate syrup and shoot them with a puff of
breath to stick on the ceiling, like stalactites of young love.
But today it holds the video rental store. Times change.
Businesses change. People come and then leave us. But the ghosts
remain. And the ghosts are the ones who make us what we are today.
I wish those kids would ask me about them.
[Slim Randles]
Brought to you by the novel
"Sun Dog Days," available at
www.slimrandles.com.
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