Grand Change Read online

It has been reported, or imagined, or whatever, that ghosts of the past hang around places that have been vacated. I don’t experience any such phenomena on Hook Road anytime I’m around. Too bad there isn’t such a thing; might enhance whatever memories and nostalgia I might be able to scare up. The various outside connections that played their part in Hook Road life don’t help much, either. One of the problems is that whatever brings familiarity is pretty much overcome by what’s changed, new or missing in its surroundings.

  In the village the railroad winds through like a grassy path, stripped naked by the absence of ties and rails and the station and warehouses that ran beside it. Standing by it, it’s hard to imagine a steam engine idling with its chant, its steam and coal smoke sweeping over warehouse men loading a box car, banking a wagon rig and its driver pulling away from the general store, sweeping upward and fading into nothing.

  A car door slams from farther up. A resident getting set to commute to work or some other function. He merely lives here, knows nothing of the local past and probably wouldn’t be interested anyway.

  There are other survivors: the church and the hall, but they’re surrounded by big modern houses and don’t fit anymore; the school, but it’s been renovated into a house and made a misfit more than the others. It’s hardly worth mentioning the few old houses in a row, two of them in broken-down gloom with their roofs caved in, their yard fences with pickets pointing in crazy directions, broken and matted with weeds. The silence of the place has an eeriness to those who knew what it was. There’s more life in the graveyard now; at least you can experience the familiarity of the names.

  In the town, there’s action at Tim Horton’s, the quick-pick store, the pharmacy and the craft shop. You can get liquor at a vendor’s. If you’re a tourist, you can have a look at the railroad artifacts and pictures at the rebuilt station house or rent a bicycle for a ride on the rail trail. All other venues of importance—the funeral parlour, bank, rink and the rest—are in the outskirts.

  It’s quite a modern town now, with new buildings differently arrayed than the old so that you’d have trouble reckoning where the horse shed and a lot of other places were. The buildings remaining have been made to fit in, like the grocery store, whose rustic appearance coincides with the craft shop’s.

  The town is modern, clean and functional and you can stand at a corner on a Saturday night and catch absolutely nothing of the buzz and festive excitement of an evening once so special or what made it that in a time so different from long ago. So wide is the gulf.

  But time and change go hand in hand. And change will come whatever and there’s no going back. The changes to Hook Road came swift, diverse and so complete that, when you look things over, all that really remains lives in the hearts and minds of those of us who lived there, and we grow increasingly few.

  But to this writer’s experience and knowledge, there have been few if any progress-related change sweeps that were so sudden and complete as the changes that happened on Hook Road. But it’s interesting to note that, in a fleeting moment, usually at the funeral of another missing link, where we comment on how it takes a funeral to bring us together, hands clasp and eye contact is made and a thousand things lived to the point of needing no mention flood in and we’re just as much a part of Hook Road as we ever were.

  Home Again

  How would it be, I wonder, to walk once more through the fields, with their gentle roll, while a friendly moon spreads its bask on the crusted snows of March and fence posts, showing white on their snow side, stand in line like old friends.

  I went home to visit on such a night, from the village where I stayed when I worked for the potato farmer.

  I can remember finding the latch on the solid old front door by knowing where it should be in the darkened porch, still smelling of potatoes and clay.

  The kitchen somehow seemed smaller as I stepped inside, but the old oil lamp on the table gave the same shallow, friendly glow it used to. We sat around the cheery old stove with our feet on the oven door in sort of a huddle, just like we used to, especially during the fierce storms that used to snuff cold and snow through the cracks. There were jokes, twenty questions, talk of almost a year’s happenings and lunch.

  And then I walked back to the village, my future bobbing like the dark shadows before me.

  The years have gone somehow and the future fades into the past. The chances of life have wrought their change. Yet I wonder, how it would be, on an evening by the light of a bright March moon, my feet crunching on crusted snow, to visit home once more.