landscape of childhood

The drive up here from Virginia starts with a short detour past the house where I lived from 1965-76. The landscape of my childhood in winter. So it was, although much of the nearby farmland has been butchered in the wake of suburbia that is burgeoning and multiplying as Legion. The road that our family house is on has changed little. The houses are still small, the trees bigger, many of the same people live along it, as I saw on the mailboxes. But the house. Well. Other people live in it. Maybe I will stop by on the way back south and ask if I can walk through the yard to the pond in the woods behind down the hill — to show Loki. And to make some photographs. To fix in Silver the volume of time that has moved through my senses. I am feeling not old, but as one who has lived long. A certain richness has moved into my experience. The layers of time and space and experience have grown to be a fertile loam where groves of narrative being can erupt in a single evening, in a single conversation. Sparked to life by the intersection of life-energies. Old friends, new friends. So it goes. We are staying with my oldest friend, Gary, his wife Ellen, and their daughter Sarah who is the same age as Vika. We speak in memories, where each phrase has a resonance unobtainable in new friendships. That resonance of historical experience, built up over time and time again, multiplied and divided.