Thinking recently about how places — houses, buildings, land — are not just things to me. They are talismans and time machines. When I walk on the grounds of Handy Heights, for instance, not only am I flooded with my own memories of times spent there when young, I also can vividly imagine my ancestors walking in the very same steps, looking at very similar views. When we are at my wife’s family’s cabin, I can help but feel the hands of her great grandfather touching the same logs on the original cabin or her grandmother sleeping in the same Murphy bunk our daughter now calls her own.
I sometimes look at the 1886 piano in the corner of our living room, built the same year as the house, and see the music teacher daughter of the woman who built it giving piano lessons to a younger student. The same golden hour light streaming alighting the keys.
And when these places are lost, due to catastrophe, sale, or otherwise, more than just the structures and their contents are gone. In a significant way, those direct tangible connections to the past are as well.
Perhaps I have an overly active method of loci.
A place very dear to our family was recently lost to wildfires. The land is still there. Perhaps it will be rebuilt and nothing has burned our memories but I can’t touch the places I once touched there again. I can’t marvel at the hand built structures of the woman who founded the place. How it was is only a memory now. A certain tangibility gone for good.