…south from Northome on Highway 71 about six miles, turn right on a gravel road, every year feeling a tingle of anticipation, another mile and a half and there it is, lane up to the house grown over, house collapsing into the earth, young spruce growing out of and into the old log kitchen. The Old Place.

The time when it was everything recedes further and further in the distance. My mind’s eye holds in reserve clear pictures of me the child and my small family on the farm in the northern woods, but I must remove myself from all distractions to see them. Now and then a smell or sound or touch also takes me back to the Old Place: vividly, sharply, poignantly. Oddly, or not, although the sense of ever greater distance is present for everything that went before in my life, I somehow experience the imagery, when present, more intimately. What does that even mean? I’m not sure…but it is true. In the last years of my mother’s life, she had powerful memories of childhood experiences on the Sioux River Valley farm where she grew up.

Robert, Marsha, Scott, Steve, and I went out home together once this summer and then I returned alone. It’s buggy this time of year so simply sitting somewhere in the grass or woods and listening for mom dad brother voices, Laddie or Pal or Buster woofs, sheep and cows commenting on their days, isn’t very comfortable. Besides it’s sentimental and more than a little silly, isn’t it? Yet I always do it.

This year, I sat in the car, all windows down, feet on the dash, closing my eyes and trying to beam myself back. I couldn’t. I love it up there, and it feels happily familiar and connected but I cannot see hear smell feel the past simply because I will it to be so. It’ll happen when I’m falling asleep or lonely back in New Mexico.

Around the house

Out on the land

The name of this blog is Time and Place because my life preoccupations are history and geography. History was my field of study as an undergraduate and geography at the heart of all my travels. In the case of my old home in northern Minnesota, those interests have become personal passions: my history on 80 acres of woods, swamp and fields.

The Old Place belongs to my sons now, and I think their intentions are to pass it on to their children. I had wished for a time with my grandchildren and their partners to spend there with Robert and me. I imagined us telling them tales of our free-range childhood and going with them to say hello to their great-grandparents at the Forest Hill Cemetery. For a while I was fixated on such a visit, but, although it is a most special place to me and, to a lesser degree my sons, that sort of attachment cannot be passed on. What I can pass forward are my writings about and pictures of one life growing up among the lakes and forests of one small green spot on the planet. They can be shared when grandchildren are older and curiosity strikes now and then, perhaps from their kids’ questions about the who, where, and when of their ancestry.

All that being said, I am going to hang out up there in that buggy north woods for a while in my 87^th year. Perhaps I’ll make stories of a few more memories and take a thousand more pictures that look much like the ones from last year and the year before…and before. The idea that sentimentality is an unworthy emotion be damned.

Heading from home up the Big Hill (well, it was steeper when we were kids?)