Memories up in smoke

Maybe as my husband and I walked around Walden Pond, we stepped on the same stones as Henry David Thoreau walked on -- maybe not -- even if we were at the site of his cabin.

We were on our memory tour showing each other places we grew up.

It was a perfect autumn day: unreal blue sky, the smell of fallen leaves crunching under our feet, but still many leaves on the trees on each side of the path. Chipmunks monitored our progress.

I couldn't show my husband my schools, all except the Highland School (now the town library) where I went to fifth grade. The rest had all been torn down. Even my childhood home had been replaced with a modern house. The barn and my playhouse, that was once my grandfather's cabin for storing his gardening tools was gone. What was left was the Robert Frost-type stone wall that bordered the pine grove although I didn't count the pines.

The golf club where I was forced to take lessons was as I remembered it. A good thing, too, because the next year the clubhouse burned down.

We went to Maynard where along with five others, I created the Digital Credit Union, now a billion dollar financial institution. The headquarters is no longer a credit union. Even the ATM is gone, but the speed bump that we named Mt. Hanahan after our custodian who put it in to slow traffic is still there.

Naturally Marty the receptionist was long gone, but who ever she was now, she let me use the ladies room, which looked identical to the zillion times I used it when I worked there earning me the name "Bitty Bladder."

We found the last of the corn on the cob of the season, a real treat. I'd missed New England corn on the cob living in Europe. 

I hope Rick enjoyed my childhood and early adulthood as much as I enjoyed where he took me for cider and donuts, spedies, the course he played and his childhood home, still standing with his mother welcoming us at the door with a "Bonjour."

As for my childhood memories, I may be one of the only people to remember the details like the dining room bay window with the plants and the "abortion" steep stair case to the second floor. After me, no one will remember. The memories will disappear like smoke.