A Deep River Year - 2017

"You can't go home again," young Thomas Wolfe entitled his classic novel. He elaborated that we can never return "back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." I have found that to be true in so many ways. The last time back in my home town, I drove past the spot where our house once stood on a... lovely street lined with tall elm trees. The trees are gone, thanks to the blight of Dutch Elm Disease, and the house is too, due to the need of a nearby college to have a parking lot. 

Other things are gone, too, perhaps more ephemeral, but nonetheless sad for me. I can't for the life of me find one of those playground merry-go-rounds--the kind with bars to hold on to as some big kid races around the outside trying his best to spin somebody off into the dust. It was joy on a summer day to ride with friends, hair flying. Presumably insurance liability concerns have done away with those things. And try to find a pick-up neighborhood baseball game in the summer. The diamonds are empty once school lets out presumbaly because there are no adults to organize the games. Parents don't want their young kids riding their bicycles around town unsupervised, where mischief and delight can happen. I could add to the list nickel ice-cream cones, black Switzer's licorice, double-feature movie matinees--and don't forget drive-in theaters where you could get a whole carload of people in for a dollar on "buck night," and for free on other nights if you could fit them in the trunk.


Missing

We still let the milkweed stalks grow
at the edge of the yard,
and now they are full of great
purple clusters of flowers,
scenting the afternoon air
and waiting futilely
for just one monarch butterfly
to come and rest.
Those orange and black winged creatures
once filled our summer world,
but they are missing, now.
And where are the swooping bats
which once dived through the dusk
for green apples tossed upward
by laughing children?
I long for the buzz of honeybees
on fields of clover,
and the magical flashing of fireflies
as we raced to collect them in jars
so that they would flicker golden light
into our dark bedroom dreams.
They all seem to have gone, somewhere,
except in the museum of my heart,
where still children fly in circles
on spinning merry-go-rounds,
and butterflies rise on the breeze,
and nothing good is ever lost.

--Timothy Haut, 2017