Time Travel

E. and H.'s backyard, 2006

For the past couple of days we've been in our former haunts of Vermont and New Hampshire, visiting friends and family. Very nice, the visiting part. Strange, the being-there-again part. Everything completely familiar, and yet...I am not the same person who used to live there. I moved through the old places with all the familiarity of a longtime resident, but felt somehow unreal -- like a ghost -- watching a place, people, and activities I was once part of, but am no longer. There was no wistfulness at all; I live elsewhere now. It was a relief to feel this, but it was decidedly strange.

The unreality was compounded by the fact that we were staying in a motel, only a few miles from our former house. One of the people we visited was my sister-in-law, now living alone in the house she shared with her now-deceased husband; during most of those years my in-laws were also still alive, and often with us when we gathered for a family meal. There we were, together, talking about her study of Arabic and what her father would have thought of it, and eating olives and lamb and baklava, with nearly everything else about our small family entirely changed. 

We had come down particularly to see a close friend and former neighbor who has moved back to her native Iceland. She was also staying in a motel, and having some memory lapses about what used to be where, so we were called upon to give directions when in the car; in the hotel suite we cooked and ate together as we often had, but not, of course, in our houses that had been next door to each other. And her child, watching tv in the next room, now eight years old and competently bilingual, was herself the stuff of many memories beginning when she herself was only a wish; when they left for Iceland she had been only two.

It felt, therefore, like several different layers of reality and removal were operating at once, and without the ground itself to touch -- my garden, the woods I used to roam in -- we passed through the few days as if in a dream, and now, back in my own home and studio, I feel a slight doubt that we were there at all.

Comments

[Martine]

I got a similar feeling when I was in San Francisco earlier this month. I know my way around, a lot of old friends are still there (though all of them moved to different houses), I recognize everything that made the city "home" and yet everything is slightly different and it's not "chez moi" anymore. For some reason that odd feeling is even more acute when I walk alone at night. Maybe it's all the ghosts following me from old hopes and unfinished love stories. ;)

Local friends kept asking me if I was visiting for business reasons. I told them that the city is still very much part of me and I think about it every day, even though I've been back in Quebec for 13 years now.

I can imagine that these feelings would be even more acute for you, considering the fact that you lived in Vermont for so long. Plus, your move to Montreal is still somewhat recent.

All this being said, we're due for lunch or dinner!

[-s]

There are few times when we are really alive to our surroundings and not enclosed within our own thoughts ... when we first arrive in a place, when we are about to leave a community long lived in, and of course when we return. I have often wondered why we cannot always be so aware of the spaces, sounds and scents of our surroundings. Perhaps it would be too difficult, or too raw. But as one of those rare moments when we can feel time running through our fingers, it should be treasured.

[Hattie]

I have lived in so many places in my life and never for more than ten years until we came to Hawaii. But my true home will always be the San Francisco Bay Area, although I haven't lived there since I was a young woman. Whenever I go back, I see the changes and rediscover the places and things that moved me then. My people are all gone, dead or moved away, except for one aunt and my sister. Last time we were there, my sister and I visited my mother's grave in the Sunset Cemetery and reflected on lost time.

[Dick]

A strange confluence of presence and absence. I've experienced this in similar circumstances and found it really quite disturbing. I guess I tend to anchor deep and I have real difficulty with that 'like-a-ghost' sense when retracing the footsteps of the past.

[Peter]

And the backyard, as if from a swing.

and without the ground itself to touch -- my garden, the woods I used to roam in -- we passed through the few days as if in a dream . . .

I visited my college town about ten years ago. Like most college towns, a lot of construction has gone up in the past twenty or thirty years. Things felt much the same anyway until I discovered that the hillside woods I used to roam in to collect myself were completely torn down in favor of new dorms. Some essential connection was gone; I felt uprooted from the place.