Journey with John Stokes

Monday, January 3, 2011

This past Christmas Eve I finally visited my father in Williston. About noon on Christmas day, I went out to his place to invite him to Gerald and Billie Earls for Christmas dinner. He said he was out of gas and had no money, I told him I would bring him in. We sat in the family room awhile and talked before leaving. While he was getting ready, I walked about the back yard and took a few quick photographs.
I did it in a sort of detatched manner, though the memories of Thanksgiving Cane grindings were fresh. All now around the syrup barn is dusty and in disrepair. The lack of use and the toll of time are taking over. I thought back to ole Homewood, his place in Crawfordville, and where most of this stuff was there, and grew sad. Though the things were moved here, it was like taking living things and setting them out here, but without soil. Now they are withered and dead.
In my imagination, I can see every plant and tree and building at Crawfordville, though they have been bulldozed over.
They continue to cry out to me. I realize that with me, and after me, the memory will grow dimmer still. My sons were little when my father sold Mrs Towles place and moved to Williston. The place of trees, buildings will be fuzzy.
If in some way, I can recreate the memory, somehow, then I will have done a small part in restoring home. A home place is something we never really knew, as with my father being a Methodist minister, we moved about. When he purchased the fifteen acre property in the sixties, it was the closest thing to home we knew. With the selling, we again, had no place to call home.
The move to Williston, though on a very nice piece of property with stately old oaks, has never felt like a homeplace.
Though we lived in Williston ten years, it just did not feel like Crawfordville ever did. Perhaps it had to do with my father divorcing my mother, his reclusion in Williston, or we were grown and unable to visit.
And even now, we stand to even lose this link to the past. My father went and did one of those reverse mortgage on the property, making it all but impossible for us to afford it once he is gone. At one point he willed the left half to me,the right half to my brother and the middle with the house to my sister. Then he went and sold several acres on the left side. Then he refused to make out a will. And thus we search for a home. And thus we come to the conclusion that upon this earth we shall never have a home. Thus, we are enjoined to seek a heavenly home,an inheritance that fadeth not away.