Hometown disappears. Why you can't go back.

Ghosts of  their parents

I loved my home town. That's where the first girls to catch my eye lived.  I got the concepts of schooling and neighbourhood, shopping and cultural happenings there.  And I can never go back because that town left home when I left home, carried in my head.   With us went the culture of those days.  Maybe buildings are still there but the people are not the same.  The closest you will ever come to going home again is a high school reunion. Love them and hate them, they are your peers and the life of the sixties lives on inside them but not in your hometown today.

No way back

I've a poignant memory from a visit to Deep River 20 years after I first left home.  Looking from my mother's front window onto the road to school, I recognized some of the kids... a couple kindergarten kids skipping hand-in-hand and some serious high school loners with their homework.  What I saw were traces of their parents.  They seemed like ghosts compared to the young men and women and their homes which I carry in my head from the sixties.