Mark's Pages

August 24, 2004:

Looking backward from a very young age.

I was eight when we left Lemon Grove. She wanted to live closer to her best friend. We'd no sooner unpacked than I wanted to visit our old apartment.

She bought a new car. "Let's visit our old apartment."

I got my first bicycle. Off to visit the old apartment. It was a thirty mile round trip from one side of a busy urban landscape to the other. I was nine.

It's as though we have a psychical or spiritual connection with the places where we live. Sever that connection, bad things happen. At minimum there's a kind of emotional disorientation, the feeling of being in the wrong place. Maybe there's more than just that.

After the Trail of Tears the Cherokee people continued for generations to mourn their lost homeland in North Georgia.

There's something so human in this flavor of loss. All of us, looking back toward some part of ourselves left behind. It's possible the association with geography is only metaphor.