The presence of the past has always held an attraction to me. Maybe it's the fact that you can still see the tracks of a time before my time, slowly receding like the sand out of an hourglass. Sometimes I feel, that if I look with my heart instead of my eyes, the stories seem to murmur to me as a soft wind to my ears.
As a little kid, I saw an old Twilight Zone show in which a man goes back in time to try and stop the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Spoiler alert: It didn't work, but the concept stayed with me. I even made a list of places I would like to go back in time to see -- famous people, events, dead relatives. I remember I left off seeing Jesus speak, as I thought he would suddenly stop in mid sermon, look at me and say, "What do you think you are doing?"
Seeing these old places and towns makes me feel like a time traveler from that fading boyhood. A chance to catch glimpses of a forgotten time when memories seem to cling to the old oak trees as they groan and creak their songs.
I found myself in Magnolia, Miss., last week to attend a weekend conference. Founded in 1856, the town by the 1870s became a retreat for wealthy Southerners from New Orleans and beyond, who took trains to enjoy Magnolia's fresh air and sparkling creeks. At one time, the city featured an opera house, skating rink and several hotels to cater to these visitors. Soon other diversions took its place, and today, this town of 2,200 people seems to be frozen in time -- its stately collection of Victorian homes gamely hanging on to parts of their time-worn grandeur, sharing space with Family Dollar, Subway and Pizza Hut.
I was given an hour off from scheduled activities that Saturday from the conference -- which was in a beautifully restored home built in 1876 called "The Comey House" -- and decided to explore the neighborhood. The sun seemed to catch my relaxed mood as I carefully maneuvered the sidewalk, which dipped and sloped like some sort of roller coaster ride due to decades of trees slowly spreading their roots in a thinly veiled attempt to reclaim primacy from the intruding concrete. An assortment of old homes -- some restored, some attempted and some just gone -- took me back to my time-traveling gaze. One grand old house set back a distance from the road was completely covered by a growth of trees and brush. It looked like a mirage of sorts, a shimmering half-remembered thing seemingly from a Faulkner novel. I picked my way back there to explore this supposed ruin, when I was suddenly startled by the low hum of an air conditioner, sitting incongruously at the bottom of a large 8-foot-tall window there at the side of the house. Slightly red-faced, I quietly backed out the way I came.
Turning up another street, a sign proclaims one house the site of Magnolia's first school in 1878. Sitting out on its inviting front porch were a smiling couple who waved me up the sidewalk. "Call us the porch people!" a smiling woman named Janellya said. "You want a nasty beer that my husband Joe is drinking or some red wine?" holding up her half-filled wine glass for emphases. They say a kitchen is the heart of a house, but the porch is its soul. My grandparents would retire to theirs every evening, my granny often with a bowl of snap beans, my grandfather lighting his pipe and spinning stories -- some I assume that were even true. Sitting there with Joe and Janellya took me back there again, the wine undoubtably speeding up that journey. I was grateful, and after an hour, departed my new friends and headed back to my conference and the present.
That night as I lingered in bed, I heard the Amtrak overnight passenger train go roaring by. Called the "City of New Orleans," it long ago quit stopping here as it operates a schedule between Chicago and New Orleans, opting instead for nearby McComb.
It's too bad, that don't know what they're missing.
NAN Our Town on 10/26/2017