Or, actually, down Queens Lane, which is the name of the road my paternal grandparents lived on for about 10 years after my grandmother retired from her factory job (Grandpa was 11 years older than her an had been retired for a while) and they moved from Michigan to Southeastern Ohio to be nearer to her family (she was born in eastern Kentucky and had several siblings still living in Kentucky at the time). For several summers, my brother and I would go spend a week with Grandpa and Grandma at their 'farm', which was two acres on a hill side next to a small dairy farm, and they grew a huge garden. Our visits always happened to coincide with the peak of green bean harvesting and canning.
But it's been over 35 years since I was last there. When they moved, and sold it, in early 1992 to be nearer my Uncle in the Akron area because Grandpa had quite bad Alzheimer's by then, and Grandma had never learned to drive a car, I was living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with DH as he was working on finishing his engineering degree.
On our way home from the Myrtle Beach vacation in July, our route took us not terribly far from the little town they had lived outside of. DH asked if I wanted to detour and drive past their old place, and I said sure! He had never been there, only heard stories from me about it. That was the piece of land that inspired so much of my desire for my own plot of land in the country with a big garden, and I had so many fun memories of the place that how could I pass up this chance to revisit it?
I knew that their old single-wide house trailer was long gone from the property. The people they had sold the land to had built their own home on it. But I thought I would recognize the land, the big red pole barn. And surely the neighboring dairy farm would be a dead giveaway. Or the small house and metal sided shed that belonged to the neighbor on the other side of Grandpa and Grandma's place.
Nope. Nope. And nope again. Instead of having been built up in the last 34 years (35 since my last visit), the whole area seems to have become grown over and more wild. Even the narrow road, always about one and a half car widths, had become less civilized. More of a two-track in some sections than an actual county-maintained road. The old houses I remembered? Most of them gone. The chicken man's shack of a house, I couldn't even tell you where it had been. The dairy farm? Not a building left!! The big red pole barn at Grandpa and Grandma's? Also gone. The other neighbor's house and shed? You guessed it, gone.
The only way I even recognized the place was as we came around a curve in the road, and it began to rise to a hill up ahead. My whole body strained forward, towards that hill. My body knew that hill even though absolutely nothing else was how I'd remembered it. As we crested the hill, my head turned left and I saw an unfamiliar house with unfamiliar small outbuildings, and I knew, I just knew sure as the sun rises in the east that once upon a time, I had swung on a stick tied to a piece of rope tied to the sturdy branch of a tree that grew atop the embankment edging the road. Right there. In the early 1980s, a 9 or 10 or 11 year old me had swung out over that exact spot in the road. And somewhere hidden behind the house that now stood on the hill, my Grandma had been inside the house trailer pressure canning beans, and Grandpa had sat in the shade of an apple tree that no longer existed. And behind that house trailer, behind that apple tree, on the other side of a field fence that was long gone, in a pasture that now was full of brush and trees, brown Guernseys once grazed, waiting for the farmer's son to drive around on his three-wheeler to round them up for milking. Way down at the bottom on the hill, now all in brush, used to be the other neighbor's shed, that if I threw with all my might, I could lob an apple from that apple tree by the house trailer on top of the hill and just barely peg the shed with a satisfying pinging sound.
Everything was both familiar and totally unrecognizable at the same time.
For a good hour or more after that, as we drove, on the interstate again, DH and I talked about what that piece of land had been, who the people had been, how life had been. It was a great way to pass the time on our long journey home to this little place here. A place that in many ways, is now what that little two acres in rural Ohio had been then.
(Except I don't swing out over the road on a stick on a rope no more. I also don't lob apples at other people's sheds. I do pick and can green beans, and walk in fields, and hear the mooing of cows at my neighbor's dairy farm. Unfortunately those cows don't graze in grassy pastures, they stand in free stall barns all day and have ground food brought to them by tractor loads.)
