By Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:
Cottonwood tree near the old Salt Plant, just northwest of Pawnee Rock – Photo by Leon Unruh
A FAMILIAR CORNER
IF YOU’VE MOVED away from the city, the town or the farm where you were raised, I’ll bet you can still picture dozens of old landmarks in your mind — buildings, trees, the neighbor’s wooden barn, a grain elevator in the distance.
You can visualize these scenes clearly, can’t you? Maybe you’re picturing a certain cove of trees, a rutted driveway, perhaps the house of a friend, or the spray-painted “Senior ‘72” that laid claim to a building downtown.
Whether we ever actually return to our old stomping grounds or not, those images are seared into our brains. When I go back to my hometown and to the countryside around it, I often think of a passage from “Population: 485” by Michael Perry.
Perry wrote, “Twelve years I lived away from here, and what I missed — what I craved — was the lay of the land. A familiar corner, a particular hill, certain patches of trees. Somewhere along the line, my soul imprinted on topography.”
In my life, one of those familiar corners Perry speaks about is just north and west of my hometown. After driving past Pawnee Rock State Park north of town, you’ll crest the hill at a T-intersection. A quarter-mile to the west is the township cemetery.
Beyond the cemetery, you’ll pass what’s left of the old Cargill salt plant. When this was an active business in the ‘60s, salt-laden 18-wheelers would thunder down the hill headed for the railroad depot where the salt would be unloaded into boxcars. A kid riding her bike learned quickly to swerve to the other side of the road when the grill of those downhill-headed semis took aim on her.
But now, most of that salt plant has been torn down. Years ago, the land with its pond and its dirt parking lot was turned over to cattle.
Farther west, at the intersection beyond the salt plant, is an old cottonwood tree. As a kid, we passed this tree every time we traveled to Grandma’s house which was over yonder on the same section of land.
So this lone cottonwood became something of a family landmark, making it one of my familiar corners. I have driven past this tree in every season. I’ve seen it against many a blazing sunset and have caught its silhouette by moonlight. The tree is part of my visual memory, a piece of my personal history.
There are countless scenes from the town and the countryside where I spent my first 18 years that are permanent images in my brain. And the best part is, I can still see the scenes as they were back then. Even though the Clutter-Lindas Lumber building was torn down a few decades ago and a new fire station built in its place, I picture the long-gone lumber yard as it was, its tin wall with the lumberyard’s name painted in black script, the metal gates covered with a fragrant vine of wild red roses, red petals littering the ground below.
Home does that to you, leaves its mark on you forever. And because these are things we’ve paid attention to, they help define us.
I’ll bet you are coming with your own familiar corners, landscapes and structures. Perhaps what comes to mind are the bronze mailboxes in your hometown post office. Or the old grocery store of your childhood – the one with the wooden floor and the blue Rainbo Bread push bar on its screen door where your mother sent you for a loaf of bread, the money curled in your sweaty little palm.
Maybe you remember the creepy house with the broken window on the walk to school, the elm you thought would make a good tree house, or the river bank where you cast many a fishing line.
We remember places that hold good memories, things that remind us of friends and family and of our home that was perhaps long ago and far away.
Someday, my old salt plant cottonwood will simply give up and drop to the ground. It seems to be headed that way now. But I will always recall its shape, how the trunk angled to the right, throwing its limbs to the left for balance. That lone tree has been a silent friend.
These old familiar landmarks tell us not only where we are, but who we are.
Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh
“But I will always recall its shape, how the trunk angled to the right, throwing its limbs to the left for balance.” I know trees like that. I have many mental landmarks from my youth in northeastern Kansas. Good column.
How amazing, Cheryl, that you can invoke those old memories of places in our minds. It’s a little sad to remember the way our school (at Woodbine) used to be, or the town, or our farm, or even the home of my parents, which is now empty and everything gone. I liked that “permanent images in my brain,” –so true! Great words; & again a wonderful message! Thank you!
This sparked so many of my own memories…thank you, Cheryl!
I like that word sparked, Kelley. That is what the column did for me plus, it sounds warm.
Thanks for the gift of these beautiful words and the memories that they carry.
Recently, I saw the empty field where my old elementary school once stood, but is now completely gone. Standing there staring at only grass, it was hard to reconcile that fact, because that old school (built in the ’20s) made such an imprint in my young mind. Sitting here now I can remember the sounds and smells and all the details of my classrooms. So I guess it’s still there, for me anyway. Remember that smell of crayons and chalk? . . .
Loved this. Sparked some words… I feel my own essay coming on.
I read a book by a European who was displaced during World War II–I don’t remember all of the circumstances of the story, but when the war was over he tried to go “home” and found that the war had so obliterated the countryside that none of the familiar landmarks were there–the landscape and terrain had been destroyed. I remember trying to imagine driving through Lyon County and not being able to see the familiar places–the thought was terrifying.