The Ghosts fade, but...
... they're always there.
I'm in Elkins, WV at the moment, visiting some of my surviving relatives. We're staying with my cousin, who lives in what was once my paternal grandfather's house. Here, and all through town, the ghosts of those gone walk along side, an ever-present but mostly quiet entourage. All four grandparents, my mother, an older sister who lived a day. Of two parents and twelve aunts and uncles (including by marriage, so six couples), five are left including Dad, and three of them are fading.
The town itself is a ghost. Much of what I grew up with is gone - replaced, remodeled, or razed to make room for a development or churches. In my minds eye, I still see the hill I used to climb to three hundred feet above my grandparent's house just for the view - (there's a Jehovah's Witness church there now.), the pond I used to fish in has been filled in and houses built on it. Places, people... they're all still there in my mind's eye - I doubt I'll ever really see this town as it is now, but always as it was thirty, forty years ago.
I'm in Elkins, WV at the moment, visiting some of my surviving relatives. We're staying with my cousin, who lives in what was once my paternal grandfather's house. Here, and all through town, the ghosts of those gone walk along side, an ever-present but mostly quiet entourage. All four grandparents, my mother, an older sister who lived a day. Of two parents and twelve aunts and uncles (including by marriage, so six couples), five are left including Dad, and three of them are fading.
The town itself is a ghost. Much of what I grew up with is gone - replaced, remodeled, or razed to make room for a development or churches. In my minds eye, I still see the hill I used to climb to three hundred feet above my grandparent's house just for the view - (there's a Jehovah's Witness church there now.), the pond I used to fish in has been filled in and houses built on it. Places, people... they're all still there in my mind's eye - I doubt I'll ever really see this town as it is now, but always as it was thirty, forty years ago.