Going Back Home When Back Home Is Gone

It happened the other day. Someone asked me something about Texas and where I grew up. I was about to begin my explanation with two simple words, and in a flash, I realized those two words were moot:

"Back home." 

My mom died almost a month ago; Dad, 26 years before that. Since three of us siblings live far away from that once-upon-a-time-and-place, we got busy and started emptying Mom's house while we were all there. My sister, who lived with Mom, doesn't want to live there without her - understandably so.  Since the house I grew up in is gone, literally moved away from our old Rt. 2 Box 75 address, and now Mom's house at 123 Memory Lane is being prepped to sell, "back home," like a Bo Jackson home run, is going, going, and soon, gone. 

"Back home." It was a simple, 2-word phrase to description the town, the home, and even the era where I grew up. Those words aren't unique to me, or the Walburg-Theon-Corn Hill Metroplex, or the old 3/2 ranch we lived in, or even the '80s. People use it all the time and, depending on the context, it could fit any or all of those antecedents. While "back home" could refer to anyone's past, I used them to refer to my town, my friends, my place: 

Back home, I used to haul hay. 

Back home, we played slow pitch softball. 

Back home, Dad had a garden. 

Back home, Mom was a teacher. 

Walburg, Texas: back home.

Thomas Wolfe wrote, "You can't go home again." Boy, howdy. It's all changed, of course, since 1981 when we moved there. I already said the old house is gone. So is Dad's garden that he cared for, producing beans, 'taters, corn, and other vegetables that Mom sweated over in the hot summer kitchen, "putting them up" for the months ahead. The barn is gone, too, as are the miles of rusty barbed wire around the perimeter of the church property, opening up what was pasture land to make way for parking at the church. The community, once branded as "Population: 59 and one old grouch" by the old grouch himself, is now multiplied by a factor of ten to the 4th power, at least. Maize fields are now mobile home communities. Half-million-dollar homes fill acres that never produced a half-million dollars' worth of anything in a single season. Unending streams of cars scurry past, neither waving at nor noticing the few kids who dare to play in their postage-stamp size yard where cattle once roamed.

I was fortunate to grow up there, back home, when I did, with those around us whom we knew and cared about in a slower, gentler, more carefree time. 

Many of those folks are gone now, names etched into marble blocks standing guard over the remains beneath them. There, the church cemetery - literally, a "resting place" for those who died - tells the community story. 

Now, Mom and Dad are buried side by side, part of that very story I learned as a kid when Dad would lead us between the stones and tell us about the people who came before us. I have to wonder: who will tell their story as time goes forward? Who will tell about and remember Walt and Janet, or Ben and Tillie, or Bert and Sallie, or Erich, or Gene, or Little Sammie Rose, people who were more than just names to be relegated to "back then," that liminal and unnamed time in the not-so-present past? 

Funny thing, that cemetery plot is the only dirt Dad owned, the only place he was able to truly call his own home, and that not until after he passed away. The irony, of course, is rich. How does one own anything in death? Then again, the title to those 64 square feet will be rendered absolute when Jesus returns, anyway. 

So, if it's not "home" anymore, and assuming Thomas Wolfe was right, then what do I call it? How do I describe it? "Back in Walburg?" "In Central Texas?" "Where I grew up?" That all seems too distant, too separate, too sterile, too removed from the place I loved and lay my head as a child. 

No. To me, it will always be home, I guess, even if it isn't and won't be home to me anymore. Then again, I guess it can be "back home," for a while, yet, as long as no one minds me calling it such. At least, not the folks who count.

You know, those folks from back home.