Curvature - the Language of Memory

How can I forget the feeling of home when Main Street is a long and winding road? How can I remember the feeling of home when remembering means separating it from who I am now? How to disentangle myself from the vines of my childhood which grew up into everything I now know, or think I know? Remembering means re-membering dismembered parts. Re-membering dismembered parts means acknowledging distinction, then finding connection.

It’s not as hard as it sounds when your hometown itself is a history of curves. Entering the village of Cornwall has always meant rounding the bend. Rounding the bend has always meant feeling Storm King Mountain heave its chest so heavy above you, shift its great weight so proudly before you. Most days, morning’s mist falls off and seems to break the sky. The sleeping dragon stirs, and wraps his tail around the place where some of us live(d). Everywhere else I've gone I've craved the presence of mountains - the sense of a great beyond murmuring behind everything that defines our lives.

I remember my hometown in the language of curvature. The farther back I look, the more my memories gain this curvature: the traction needed to stay in one’s orbit. First, I’m standing on a road that appears straight. Then, the more distance I get on it the more I begin to see its natural arc. And the more I begin to see the arc of any one particular thing, the more I notice how it bends towards itself, curling into its ownmost. When we tell stories, miraculously a life comes to light, a golden thread connecting what would otherwise fall prey to occurrences - exempt from proof of larger things. The memory of a thing has a curvature that the thing itself does not. This is the flection of the past, the contour of cognizance. I suspect this is the case for most people. But I can, of course, only speak for myself.

I grew up in a small town in New York, so my years have always had four distinct seasons. I have grown to love - to need - this repetition. The repetition of the year’s longing grows rings around my soul. Summer is too hot to stand. In my youth I drank from the creek and cupped its frogs, letting their heartbeat steady me. The town pool was always teeming with giddy toddlers and later, with suntanning teenagers. Autumn here borrows the gold from summer and seamlessly and suddenly riddles it with deep and varied colors. Only the suggestion of black lives at the edges of forests. Wet yellow leaves fill the ground until the earth is glutted, and turns itself over. Winter is snowy - twilight electric. The air is crisp and everywhere you smell wood stoves burning. Spring is alive with the ripeness of being. And in the treachery of flux, all is mud and rain and forever fluid. But these are only details. Life back then was too sweet for most of the words I have now. I try to find those words which act like a door beneath my feet. The ones where speaking means falling and falling means finding. Beyond the looking glass.

The elementary school was brick in my town. A few years back a group of parents led a committee to build a new playground in the recess yard. But there was a beloved and battered metal slide that ran the length of the hill around back, and which had been there for as long as anyone could remember - which is to say: forever. There was one question that the parents of the playground committee had to answer so often that they ended up making t-shirts that read: “yes, we are going to keep the slide.” People couldn’t bear to get rid of it. So they didn’t. And sometimes that’s all it takes.

Directly across the street from the school was the old firehouse - also brick. Brick against brick. Bric a brac. This was a mirror. Go past the mirror. Continue down the same road and go past the tiny post office where mail circulates and is often lost, past the dance studio where dancers spin in rooms that used to be part of the old bowling alley, past the elementary school and the firehouse, past my home street, past the food bank and the Village Pizza, and should you decide to continue you find yourself falling down a steep hill and landing at the riverfront. Here is where it’s forever windy. Here is where it feels like a dream. Here is where you come to some horizon, cannot go farther. Here is where the willow tree subsists, as if in a bubble. And subsisting, it endures- if anything eternal endures. Images whose edges are blurred with the threat of nothingness rise up in me like bubbles. They reoccur in my mind.

For the annual fishing contest, extra fish were dumped in the pond just so that children could fish them out. At Easter, eggs were scattered around Town Hall just to be found by eyes as sleepless and hands as small as our own. Because it is a joy to hide simply for the sake of finding. Halloween took us all over town. Sheets of butcher paper were taped to all the storefronts for the halloween painting contest. The sheets stayed up for weeks. Brittle leaves cracked and crunched under the smallest of feet. Homeland was where everyone would go to trick-or-treat. I came to the porch of my old art teacher. Ms. Goldie stood at the door, and looked the same as she did when she stood in the classroom, and somewhere at the end of some hallway of my memory she still stands. People of our past are littered throughout our memory, they protect and guard, and hold great sway over us.

There lies in us such a deep and joyous desire to share. And yet the things we most want to share are the same ones which most evade words. And so we talk around - and life becomes about - all the things we can never talk about. And hometowns change, feature by feature, over many years, and many hills, and many childhood details. And isn’t it strange how a town becomes a home? And later - how a home becomes just a town? And when they do, our memories curl around to encase and preserve their wonderful, beautiful images which no longer mirror any factual reality. We map the curve and find the slope and plot the points and work backwards.