One of my friends from high school brought my attention to the new video just released from Blake Shelton. It's almost entirely filmed from the cab of a pickup (plus a few seconds of the outside of the truck), driving around my hometown. Most of it was five blocks or less from one of the two houses I lived in growing up there, and I've been left feeling so homesick I can barely stand it. I held my breath watching it, wanting to see a glimpse of one of my former homes. Once there was a flash of a bus parking lot that I think was at the other end of the alley that my bedroom faced, in the house that was my grandparents' place before it was ours. Later, there were several seconds of footage driving down the street two blocks from the tiny house that my mother bought right after she divorced my father. I paused the video, and just stared at it, missing my childhood. I saw myself walking to school down that street. I remembered being eleven, and being allowed to drive the riding lawn mower from my grandparents' house, down the five blocks to my mom's house, but I don't remember whether I was the one who actually mowed either lawn that time. Most of the video is in very quick bursts, so I had to guess where a lot of it was. I am sure I will go through it and freeze frame the whole thing, just to see my old stomping grounds. It made me very sad to see the deteriorating sign from Bob's Barbecue, where the world's best ribs came from when I was little. They would mound a whole or half rack of beefy perfection over the top of a huge pile of long, greasy french fries, with cole slaw and beans on the side, along with a cup of the basting sauce to dip the ribs in, and even as a little girl, I could make a big dent in that giant meal. When I was a teenager, Bob died, and the subsequent owners claimed to have the recipe for the sauce, but we all knew it just wasn't as good. It lumbered on for a couple decades, even expanding up to Norman, but it was never the same, and eventually, several years ago, it closed down. One more piece of my childhood forever out of reach, as surely as my old houses are now that they have been sold to new families.
It's very difficult for me to let go of the house that was my grandparents'. I have a little trouble getting the story straight over exactly who bought the place first, my grandfather or great-grandfather. I know that by the time I came along, my grandparents lived in the big house and my great-grandmother was living up in the apartment over the garage. That place was a magical land of from-scratch chocolate cakes, Krackle bars, an antique radio that was the most beautiful piece of furniture I ever saw, and a birdcage with a little clockwork bird that "sang." It usually smelled a little of natural gas, from the floor furnace in between the living room and the kitchen, but the whole energy of the place made me feel like that diminutive, sturdy German woman loved us kids more than anything. Both the garage apartment and the main house taught me very early on how powerful smells are when evoking memories. It takes very little to set my consciousness firmly back in that big old house, and it wrenches my heart when I realize I can't ever go back in it. When the weather cooled off here last month, and I opened up the windows and turned off the a/c, the inside of this house just got sticky and warm instead of freshened. At one point, the heat from above made the upstairs smell like hot attic, and that was a huge trigger to send me back to the old house. Only a handful of rooms had window air conditioners, and for years we just cooled it at night with an enormous attic fan. If I close my eyes somewhere I can smell old lumber, insulation, and dust, I can immediately feel myself standing at the top of the stairs, pulling the chain that turns on the attic fan, and I can hear it start up, pulling open the vent blades, and drawing air up along my skin. It is one thing I cannot wait to install in the Forever House, once we move back to Colorado, where an attic fan is sufficient to cool a house at night in the summer.
Next year is supposed to be a reunion year for me. I haven't missed one yet, but they are harder to handle when I no longer have family there for me, and the houses are inhabited by other families. My life has moved on, and I am not going to go back there for any great length of time. But my soul still roams those streets. I think I need to watch that video one more time, for old times' sake.
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