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Historical October 1980 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
It is always, in my recurrent dream about the neighborhood, late in the afternoon of a mild and golden autumn day. My side of the street has grown suddenly cool in its shadows, but across the street it remains bright and warm, immune from time.
It is a Catholic dream, though not a religious one. Just now. toward the end of a Saturday. the half-dozen or so girls who blamed each other for getting late to 4:30 Mass conspire to be late for dinner, dawdling, scuffing leaves. taunting, enjoying each other.
In my dream they are never late.
They never arrive. There is no hurry. There is no time.
In real time, in increasing numbers, those girls have been getting married in the old dowager of a church, and I find myself giving them away with bad grace. as if they were my own daughters and had decided to marry jugglers or chimney sweeps.
What has happened to me, and perhaps to others, is that a tide of more than property values has ‘risen in the neighborhood. History has been accumulating, soundlessly. like layers of leaves in a far part of the forest.
The neighborhood has buried some of its old ones.
It turns to early settlers, surprisingly still alive, for stories of the hard times.
It makes legends and tells them over and over. embroidering, heightening color. There are achaeological layers now, geological strata.
In a cross section of my lawn, I could find an age of panic selling and the night the neighbor boy’s dog was killed by a car.
I had not felt that kind of history as an urgent thing until one Fourth of July.
The woman and her daughter were there at the door, the mother saying this had been her house as a little girl. Let in, she clearly owned the house again, memory giving her brief proprietary rights.
She approved the absence of change, the fireplaces still reigning, unpainted, as household gods, the fine stairway free of carpet leading up past stained-glass windows to bedrooms where, for all she knew, the same toys still stood in the same corners.
She had been peremptory, scarcely apologetic in reclaiming her past, and I now realize that she would happily have stepped over my body to get at it. Ruthless myself. I knocked on doors this summer.
An ancestor, four generations back, had bought 40 acres in Wisconsin when James K. Polk was President, then, hearing about blacker, flatter land, had moved to Iowa after the Civil War.
His farms have long since passed into other hands. but it seemed possible that by going to Wisconsin and Iowa I could get him closer, within range, make out his shape if not his features.
The current tenants were sympathetic, touchingly so, pointing out deserted foundations, some words and a date carved on a sagging shed. I did not divulge what I knew, that according to the 1850 census my man could neither read nor write, that I had seen his mark (x) on property deeds, and that his wife, also given to X’s, spoke only the Irish until the day she died.
Part of the Wisconsin property is for sale, a grave temptation to own some of my past.
This is a temptation to be resisted, and not only because a developer has christened the land Glen Erin Estates in honor of its first settlers.
It occurred to me that my ancestor, illiterate or not, would have found me a fool for buying what he had cheerfully sold in favor of a better future, my present. I shall have to let go of the Wisconsin property, leave it in the care of the family I found there — ten children, and at night they eat out on the deck — relinquish it without ever having owned it.
Back in Missouri, the ancestor’s voice is less audible. I must learn these things from other instructors.
Another former babysitter has become a bride, turned pro.
My daughters have become babysitters.
The nice young man who used to pack my groceries is running for mayor.
The neighborhood. in all the endings and beginnings it has seen, is my home and my mentor.
It tells me that I cannot dictate the terms on which it will change.
It will stand still, just so, only in dream and memory.
But the past is a closed fist, never really gives up its ghosts, pays poor dividends.
The future is an open hand. There is more of time than there is of us, and our children, and our neighborhoods. Time teems fertilely and never looks back. Let fall come.
Originally published in The Paper, October 1980.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1980_10.pdf, printed page(s) 1; PDF page(s) 1.
