The woods are lovely ...

The past few weeks have been rather melancholy for me. It always is, around the holidays,with memories of past and childhood blowing in alongside the cold weather.

But something very different happened this year. Yesterday, my friend Wayne sent me some photos he took of my childhood home. My parents sold the house some years back and I haven't been back to my hometown in years. But seeing the photos of the place as it is now was quite a shock.

I grew up in a magical place - at least it was magical for an introverted kid with a big imagination. Our house was in the middle of a big pine forest, a small part of what's known as the Piney Woods. To my brothers and me it was just 'the woods.' We went out into the woods, played in the woods, explored the woods.

Sadly I do not have a photo of the house as it was, but here's a view of 'the woods' from my backyard, circa 2003

Those acres of land was my world. I was never a hunter - I shot a few birds with a .22, and I may have potted a squirrel or two at the prodding of my brother, but I never killed a deer or went on a serious hunting trip. To me the woods were for exploration and creating worlds. They were unexplored jungles, the forests of Colonial America, wildernesses on far away planets, the cities of aliens who built structures like trees ... or whatever world pushed its way to the front of my brain on that particular day.

Some weekends I would get up in the morning and, except maybe for a quick lunch, spend the entire day in the woods. We built forts, we made trails - my dad even built us a tree house, sitting up on parallel beams bolted together around tree trunks. They moved with the swaying of the trees, and seemed like it would last forever.

There was an old shack somewhere out in the woods - and next to it an old well that we were warned against falling into. I found the shack but I never saw the well. I'm sure it was there somewhere. There was a pipeline trail that served as the main highway in our incredibly intricate system of trails crisscrossing through the woods. Some of those trails were cut by my father with his bush hog, some by my brothers, and a few by me. They led to the forts and treehouse, to the baseball park, the convenience store (where we went for ICEEs against the expressed orders of my father), the golf course, an old cemetery (where I was terrified to go), the railroad tracks ... even to the local airport, if one was willing to travel far enough and risk getting stuck in a couple of very large mud pits. (For the record, I can assure you that I never rode my dirt bike across the airport runway while a plane was landing, nor do I know anyone who did. That would be irresponsible and highly illegal!)

But most of those places were a good distance away, and I only discovered them in my teen years as I roamed further and further. As a younger kid, I spent most of my time close to the house. The great thing about the woods is you could be a dozen yards away from a road or a house and still feel like you were in the middle of an untamed wilderness. I studied plants, I picked berries, I climbed trees. I did it all. I found a weird door once - a vaguely car door like object, lying in the middle of the woods with nothing else around. I made up an entire history for how a car door had gotten into the middle of the woods (my dad later identified it as an airplane door, that must have fallen off of one of the small airplanes that flew in and our of our small local airport - see above). After my brothers moved, I was the king of the woods. I would have groups of friends over and we'd play hide and seek, pine forest style. I was always the last one found.

The top of the driveway as it was years ago

I was the youngest kid so I was the last one home. Eventually I grew up, as everyone does. I got my driver's license, went to college, and then moved away. The forts fell apart, the trails overgrew, and even the stoutly-built tree house rotted and fell down. I would still explore the trails when I came home for holidays, but they were grown up now, and it just wasn't worth the time to clear them out again for a brief reminiscence.

A few years ago, my parents moved away from my hometown and sold their house. I knew that the buyer was developing the land, but I never really connected 'developing' to the reality of it. That is, until I saw the photos.

When I was a kid, you couldn't see the house from the road. Just trees and a long driveway. Head up on that about a tenth of a mile, and the house would emerge from the trees - a small, neat pocked of civilization surrounded by pine. Seeing the house pop up out of the trees was always a sign that we were home.

But not anymore. The photos I looked at contained just a few things - the house, the garage, some concrete, a few trees, and dirt. A lot of dirt.

View from the highway. Driveway was on the left.
Photo by Wayne Galli

My entire childhood world had been clear cut.

I'm not angry or upset about it. I'm not against progress. People build things - just about every house, building, or road we have used to be trees, or plants, or rock. That house itself used to be forest. The house I'm living in now used to be forest. The computer I'm writing this on used to be minerals and parts that were mined or created from something else. When you build something tangible, it inevitably means tearing down something else.

But this was different for me. This was the woods. That eternal world that was so big, so everything, and now is just ... gone. Just like that.

From the road that runs behind the house. As a little kid, I watched them build the road from which this photo was taken.
Photo by Wayne Galli

I'm not so much sad about it as I am introspective. It's something I'm still grappling to process. Life is change, and it's far better to live in the present than constantly mourn over the past. That world was gone anyway, years ago, except in the memories of the people who grew up and lived there.

That's the best any of us can hope for, really.