still in love with you.

Pardon if this seems daily diary, but again, it's my WebLog, I'll do whatever, eh! Friday, yesterday, we drove from PCB to StAndrews to check 7H, check for mail (been no mail to HV in a week now). What comes to mind - -

that seventy-five and that years ago I used to ride with Mom & Pop up to Grand Ridge to visit two of Mom's sisters, Aunt Alice and Aunt Nell, who were married to King brothers. Aunt Nell had a reed organ on her closed in front porch, and I made great use of the time there playing my piano lessons on her organ while pumping with my feet to keep it going and from whining down.

Aunt Alice's family had a farm, or raised livestock, as a child I never really knew but did learn to walk carefully in the barnyard, and to know that when we had Sunday dinner there, the table was bending with weight of food, a King's spread. The fried chicken was memorable, but I did learn not to help myself to the sliced pork and gravy the time my first bite was outside skin still covered with hair. They had a standard of the day unpainted Southern farmhouse with front porch, center hall all the way through the house, living room on one side in the front, parlor on the other side, parlor with Victorian furniture and only used for company. Today's memory is that sitting on the back porch the years and times we visited, was a toilet, a newfangled flush toilet, waiting to be installed inside the house in due course and for family would replace the privy, the usual outhouse a short, discrete walk out behind the house, common in those days, as a matter of fact, Mom & Pop's house at 1040 E. Caroline also had an outhouse out back, that my mother absolutely forbade me to enter. Anyway, in 7H, the HOA's contractors have cleared out three rooms, including the half-bath and stuck the washbasin and the toilet outside on the porch to bring back such old memories. Mayhaps in time it will regain its place inside.

Two pics, one showing Courtney Point in the background; other with Redfish Point in the distance seemingly missing the Lonesome Pine that Robert and I celebrated for years.

Anyway it adds a touch of class to the porch.

In StAndrews as we drove on 9th Street past eight and ten foot stacks of cut pines, oaks, magnolias by Malinda's house and The Old Place, I saw that while the house seems okay except for tarps on some of the roofs, the personality has changed: on a place that I once thought of as Cedar Hill, all the huge old cedar trees gone. Along the Calhoun Avenue side, and in the front yard, even the old double-trunk cedar. Somewhere I have a picture of my father at age five, which would have been 1916, up in that tree, dressed in his Sunday best. The emotions come and go, but I'll never stop going to the magical old neighborhood just because of what its devastation does to me, that it's gone, no longer there. 

The memories are mine, in my mind, still to me as real as what is gone. I see a little more each time we drive by, but The House looks good. It's no longer mine, why do I keep going back by? This morning I'm thinking of a story, book or movie (not sure) that I've recalled here before. A young man and a young woman who had been lovers were breaking up and going separate ways. In a final, emotional conversation, the girl asks, "Can't we be just friends?" The boy, young man, answers, "No, we cannot be just friends, I'm still in love with you." That's my problem with this Old Place that strangers now own, that my grandfather built, and my parents later owned, and so many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren knew as the old family home; and that for a while was even mine: I'm still in love with you. Will I ever be able to go back inside The Old Place where I raised Kristen? IDK.

We were back home in 7H for a while on Friday, when I took pictures. Friday was a beautiful day off and on, sometimes windy, a little bit cool as late October should be. We are going back this afternoon, to spend Saturday night in 7H, so making sure to be at the church on time Sunday morning. 

Friday evening treat: the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, with the gang in costume heading out for trick or treat, PigPen raising a cloud of dust, Charlie Brown getting a rock, Linus in the sincere pumpkin patch, Snoopy the WW1 pilot raising his swagger stick in response to salutes, his sopwith camel shot down by the Red Baron, making his way back through enemy lines ... season favorite eagerly anticipated and faithfully watched with beloveds for years and years and years!

First and last, on East Beach Drive, an old dock that a friend named Tom's Bridge.

T