In The Receding Mists

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Every time a visit to Portugal looms, I find myself struggling internally. And I have to ask myself what is wrong with me.

Don’t get me wrong. Part of it is traveling. I despise travel and the further away I have to go the harder it is to psyche myself for it.

Yes, even cons. Years ago — I think now my grumpy nature is better understood — when I was writing six books (tradpub which is always more work/time consuming than indie books) a year, and driving the kids around, etc, friends used to tell me “Oh, don’t worry, con xyz is coming up. You get to relax and have fun.”

Of course, for me cons are work and back then they were fairly terrifying work, since I was meeting editors, and a misspoken word could make or break my career. Now I go to cons to meet fans, and by and large I love my fans and fans and my professional friends are quirky and kind and can quite pleasantly ignore my more awkward quirks.

So now my relationship with cons is love/hate. I actually enjoy hanging out with friends and spending time with my fans. But I still hate traveling, I hate sleeping in hotels, I hate not having my cats and my ROUTINE. I like waking up and having my food, and my coffee and petting my cats and talking to my husband, and sitting in my chair to work. I like evening walks with my husband (when I can convince him.) I like– Well… I like my life and the older I become the more I autistically resent disruptions to it.

But you know, there are things we could be doing… Suppose my husband had arranged for a stay at a seaside B & B for a week or two. I’d still be fried over “we have to leave the cats!” (Particularly with how Havey is right now. I mean, we might only have two weeks.) But I’d kind of be looking forward to it. Relaxing for two weeks, no cleaning, no home maintenance, no cooking. Just writing, and walks on the beach.

Okay, but going to the beach in the States we could drive. It would not involve long plane rides, 24 hours with connections.

Okay, but here’s the thing: Imagine I was going to Great Britain, or Italy or Greece, in the 1990s. (The specification is important, since right now much of the world appears to be on fire, which in turn makes me hesitant to going.) I’d be excited. Looking forward to it.

So, do I seriously dislike Portugal? Is that the problem?

… No. I mean, would I go to Portugal if I didn’t have family there, and a complicated relationship relating to growing up there?

No. Probably not. Mostly because my cultural touchstones, the places where I’ve set stories, are not there. So, I’d try to see the places where I dream.

BUT supposing I had no history with Portugal and were visiting, I’d also, again, probably be excited. Because, you know, it’s an interesting country, with an interesting history, nice beaches, a wealth of historical architecture. We’d go, poke around museums and such, and have a grand old time.

So… Is it my family?

Well, no. They’re the ones enticing me there at all, in this election year when I’m more nervous than a cat at a canine show and really hate to leave the country.

And they’re not so all-encompassing that Dan and I won’t “escape” for two or three days, or five or six one day at a time, and go walk around castles and museums, Roman ruins and old churches. (And yes, I’ll try to post pictures.) We’ll be home in the evening for dinner and to see relatives, and that works.

It’s more… the country. It’s….

Things will have changed. Yes, the relatives too, but also the places that harbored memory. Places I used to go cannot be found. Little stores I loved; patches of wood I walked through; the little art materials store that required one to take the 19th century elevator that creaked and swayed, all of it is gone, as though it had never been. The places where mom and I used to have ice cream. The coffee shops where my friends and I unhooked the world and turned it around the other way are all vanished.

The places I grew up, grandma’s house where I go when I dream, are all either so changed that they’re unrecognizable, or gone, plowed under, paved over.

It’s in a way like visiting the graveyard and looking at pictures on the graves, and remembering the people you knew, only with places. (Though at my age there’s plenty of tombs of friends and relatives that I’ll inevitably visit on the trip.)

But more so, because I found the last time that the places I loved have forgotten me. Meaning that my mother’s friends, people I knew, no longer remember I exist. In a way this makes perfect sense. After all, I was never central in their lives, and I’ve been gone almost half a century. Memory rewrites and heals over.

And you know, here’s the thing, even if I could go back there 40 years ago, I wouldn’t be the same going back, so it would all still feel strange and out of place. Because I have changed. I found recently how much I have changed, and how little I can tolerate the small concessions that used to be second nature to me when I lived there. The culture rubs me wrong, not because it’s changed (Oh, it probably has, but not markedly) but because I’ve changed so profoundly. Become a foreigner. And of course, everyone who knew me and remembers me still expects me to belong, to KNOW to fit in effortlessly. (Spoiler: I never fit in effortlessly, I merely used to be able to pretend.)

So even if I could go to the past, I’d fit oddly. The person who lived there and the things she loved, even if she never quite fit in, is quite gone, as if she’d never been.

Except for memories. Strange memories. Early morning, in deep fog, coming out of the train in downtown Porto. The old buildings vanishing into smoky fantasy. The trolley cars. Perhaps a hint of a smell of roasting chestnuts. The bookstores, where I could lose myself for hours. The coffee shops where I could sit and have a coffee and a pastry, and read…

Sitting on my parents’ terrace, late a summer night, listening to music and looking up at the dark sky with all the stars. (The fields around there are now skyscrapers, the stars lost in the light.)

There are memories and things I loved. But they’re not there anymore, just like I’m not there anymore.

And all that stays behind is memories. Snapshots in the mist. Sitting down to tea with grandma. Walking under the drizzle through downtown streets, the thought of a book waiting me up the road guiding my steps. Summer evenings with the late-setting sun drowning in red in the west, and a warm breeze blowing.

The people and places I loved and which are gone. Just as I am in a way gone.

The me that I barely remember passes through, a ghost among the ghosts.

We live not in places, but in slices of places and time. Before and after us, others possess places we love and live in them their way. Our time remains back in the past. New times take its place. People forget us, and we forget them. Absence like death dress people with their best smiles, perhaps, but it also changes them in our minds to what they never were.

Maid most dear, I am not here. I have no place, no part. No home anymore, in sea or shore. Except in your heart.

93 thoughts on “In The Receding Mists”

  1. We will welcome you back when you return. And, in a way, you cannot really leave us. You just will be away for a bit.

    We got this. Enjoy the trip.

    Liked by 2 people

  2. I LOVED the description of Porto. I only got to visit twice, in brief liberties when I was in the Navy. And it wasn’t ‘quite’ the same for me, but the feel of the description, YES! That was it! And later in the day, walking along a sunny street, with the people and the statues and the smells, it all came rushing back. Amazing! Thank you for sponsoring that quick, bright memory!

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  3. It’s tough to go ‘home’ again. Visiting places that are not what they were, and really, in a lot of ways never had been. Memory washes experience with a gloss, sometimes making it shiny, other times more terrible than it really was. The brain is a funny thing.

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  4. Love that photo. I do believe I stayed at a small hotel one time right in front of the tram line during one of my business trips. Have been to Porto and Lisboa and driven between cities.

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  6. Now you’ve germinated my memories of East Coast urban and rural life of 60 years and more ago. From Appalachia to DC and NYC. The mountains are still the nearest to same, but only by bits and pieces. Sigh.

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  7. every day I go into the city for work now I have this experience. Everything is gone and what’s replaced it is mostly ugly. Still, I was at a funeral in the old neighborhood yesterday and realized what I missed about the place — the banter, I really miss the banter, but even that is passing since it was a characteristic of the native New Yorker and not these rich people who seem to be replacing them. Sigh. I’m getting old.

    A question for our hostess. What would be the best time of year weather wise to walk from, say, Porto to Compostella? It’s been a dream of mine since I was young and the wife has been pushing me to actually do it,

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    1. Oh. I have never done the pilgrimage. It wasn’t a thing when I was young (Don’t know why.) My SIL and cousin have.
      The best time of year in Porto is usually around September, but not sure of the route.

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      1. Thank you.

        Fatima pushed it out.

        there are two routes a direct one through the interior and one along the coast. Once you cross into Spain they run together. Fewer hills on the coast route. I was looking at either April or September. Lots of rain in April, but I could be in Compostela for Easter, since it’s early next year. Decisions, decisions.

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        2. My parents did the pilgrimage on foot to Fatima in the 70s. Dan and I always meant to do it, but his knees went out ten years ago, and now I suspect it won’t happen.
          April/May are usually pleasant, but yeah, can be moist.

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    2. I’ve watched the city around Redquarters for 40 years or so now. I miss what was here in the mid-1990s, and the night skies. Yes, there are more amenities. I’m not sure about some of the other changes.

      When a family-owned ice cream and sandwich shop closed for the last time in late July, it felt like something important died in that neighborhood. (They’d flooded last year along with the other buildings near the drainage lake. Unlike them, the ice cream shop couldn’t survive the rebuilding and inflation without raising prices so high that families couldn’t eat there. So they closed.)

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      1. I also miss the culture, the friendliness. People are still friendly, but are more guarded, in part because there are so many people from other cultures and approaches to the world. And many of those newcomers – from inside the US as well as outside – prefer to change the town rather than changing themselves.

        [I’ve been there, but I sorted out what to keep and where to bend so the culture flowed around me. I didn’t try to change the culture.]

        Liked by 2 people

    3. My mom did the Camino all the way from France in September and October. Plenty of rain, but it was nice regardless of the fact that she spent most of the trip posting “why did I think this was a good idea?” (She turned 71 along the route.)

      At her age, it was more about having done it than of the doing it.

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        1. She did it through a trip planner that rented her accommodations and moved her overnight pack from one to the next, so she only had to carry her day pack.

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  9. {Stopping part-way through reading then going back to work.}

    Yeah, I hear you. The small town I lived in till I was nine, almost ten cut down all their trees about 15 or 20 years ago. Main street was lined with all these grand, old oak trees. It was almost a shaded tunnel. I’m sure it was nerve wracking during a hurricane. And most of the people have passed—my grandmother’s sister, her bachelor son, my first Sunday School teacher (all of whom lived in the country). The ones my age moved away. We moved home, although it wasn’t home to me at first. The small town did repair their mill pond, as I recall, after a hurricane damaged it.

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  11. It’s the same for me, looking back at where I grew up, also – and I have been away from California for the same number of years. The house on a hilltop with a view of mountains and the sprawl of outer suburbia – that one and the entire neighborhood was demolished by highway construction in the early 1970s. My grandmothers’ house, which I often visit in dreams is unrecognizable. The outer suburb itself is gentrified, paved, reconstructed … and unrecognizable now. I can’t even find my other grandparents house, or the various mobile home parks that they lived in after that. Only the outline of the mountains remains the same.

    Mountains – the one thing which I still miss seeing, here in Texas.

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  12. Those memories seem to be fertile ground for fiction.

    I think at least 4 of my friends/family have traveled to Portugal or the Azores in the last year. Or Japan. Why those two countries?

    The world changes around us. At one point, we lived near towns that were rapidly changing. Returning after a 2 month gap, buildings had been torn down or replaced.

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  13. I went home today It wasn’t there
    Shifted vistas, disrupted tranquility
    My visions ransacked by the reality
    Familiar senses absent I despair
    Which is the altered, it or me?
    Have I lost my place, my origin?
    Where are my roots? I rail at the deviation
    Who has done this? It threatens my identity, my me
    Severed from the beginning, how can I know my end?
    I saw the seed fall
    Carried by the wind in its whirlygig way
    Spinning round and round
    Flitting, swooping, twirling
    It finds its resting place, its hearth
    Where it sinks deep its roots
    And then I saw: I was a seed once
    And I know my home

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  14. You get odd feelings even if you live in a place for a long time. More the outlying regions. And especially the trees. It’s a lot easier to remember that there used to be a store here than that it had three towering maples where now it just has grass.

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  15. I live barely a hundred (road) miles away from where I grew up, and my earliest memories were formed. But it isn’t the same, either.

    But, when I think back on it, even though I was still living there in the same house, it wasn’t the same place when I was twelve, compared to when I was eight.

    Change constantly happens, even when you think you are standing still yourself. The only permanence is in your memory – hopefully only the good parts.

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    1. I live just over a mile north of my childhood home, where mom still lives. Neighborhoods have grown up around the area, but pretty much the same place I grew up. It’ll be hard to let the house go when it is time. It was hard to see paternal grandma’s place at 24th and Harris go, because it was grandmas. But subsequent owners have made it theirs. Even harder to let maternal grandparents place go. But … house is now gone (needed to be, no complaints) and they’ve improved the property. I am sure the people who we bought our house from would be appalled of the changes we’ve made, and continue to make, since we’ve owned it for 35 years.

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  16. A few years back I returned to my ‘old’ stomping grounds for the funeral of a friends mother. The old High School is now a big admin building and they built a big shiny new one just outside of town. That whole neighborhood – I lived across the street from the old school – was still “there” but the trees were all gone, a couple of the houses were gone/remodeled The small church at the end of the block was also just gone… The places we used to hang out were, for the most part also gone. There were a few stores that were still on Main but the majority were now something else. Well, fifty years will do that I guess.

    What has really hit me as an official retired old fart this year, is how the change seems to be faster now than I remember from decades past. We’ve lived in our current place for just short of ten years and I noticed the trees have grown so I can’t see that other place just west of us anymore, just the (now) bigger trees. The big shopping mall close to us has had about 40% or better ‘turn over’ and most of the stores that have left are, again, just gone.

    Eh, I am not complaining, just observing how as we age the perception of place changes too. What I really enjoy is finding spots where the change is minimal and I can enjoy the merge of memory with present events. I hope you will find those spots on your trip and can merge happy new memories with some of the old places.

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    1. Not only one, but all three, of my old grade schools are gone, and no more. Only one was rebuilt and retained the same name. Middle school and high school buildings have been replaced with something that no way resemble the old buildings. Not complaining. The reasons (well one grade school not so much, but …) were reasonable and almost a requirement.

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  17. There are memories and things I loved. But they’re not there anymore, just like I’m not there anymore.

    I sometimes wonder if this isn’t why so many people are ready to adopt the Leftist idea that only present rules and virtues matter?

    “All these things that were supposed to always be there vanished? Why should rules and virtues be any different?”

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    1. the rejection of God has yet another ill effect.

      when I was a child I never thought that the phrase “as it was in the beginning, is v now, and will be forever” was so comforting.

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  18. This is where I’m supposed to invoke that ancient Roman (I think) philosopher who said you cannot step into the same river twice. Sometimes I grumpily dismiss that as hair-splitting. In this case, perhaps not.

    It’s a different experience when the river carries us along. The landscape around the river changes, often to something very different from where we originally entered the course. Still, it feels like the same river, because we have been moving along with it. We accept the transition much more smoothly if we’re part of the unfolding, rather than exiting and re-entering it.

    That’s my offering of philosophy for the day. That, and hoping America doesn’t change unrecognizably for you in the short while you’re away from us. Usually I’d be confident of that. Right now, I’m mostly confident.

    Enjoy the trip when it happens.

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    1. Colorado is also gone for me. I miss it. I do realize part of it is my stupid body which insists on going spaz at altitude, but it’s also gone in my tenure there from highly libertarian to commie….

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      1. I suspect that, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and even California, New York and Maryland, once you get away from the cities it hasn’t changed much politically from the mid-50s; I know that’s true in PA and MD. The blue cities are the cancers, but I don’t think that cancer has metastasized as much as quite a few are afraid it has.

        No, as noted you can’t step in the same river twice, also phrased as you can’t go home again, but the memories are still there.

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        1. In MD it had metastasized to the point that every county on either side of I95 is infected. Howard County lost its mind and went woke about the time I retired in 2018.

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          1. Howard County was tending toward being a semi-clone of Montgomery County when I left in ’06, but it hadn’t gone very far. Carroll even less, and Anne Arundel seemed to be an outlier; it was closer politically to Frederick than to either Howard or Baltimore (County, not Chicago-on-the-Patapsco). The three western counties were still almost fully rural; Frederick a bit less so. And the Eastern Shore remained a law unto itself, also almost completely rural.😉

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            1. Howard was colonized by the blacksheep of some.NYC real estate family. Bought up land in the 70s and 80s then developed it. His model made so much green space and lacked signs….they had more deer in the county than elsewhere in maryland because it wss illegal to hunt in thr county. It got fixed eventually.

              Continued exoansio of Fedgov has drow ed Frederick County, is starting to drown Washington county and parts of eastern WVa. We need to shut down the Fedgov and literally shrink it

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        2. Unfortunately, the blue cities have enough population in many states to be able to override the wishes of the red areas. Cancer is a good way to describe it.

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          1. Oregon. Greater Portland along with Salem, dominate the rest of the state. I am sure my fellow blog Oregonians would agree (yes, Eugene and Corvallis don’t help the rest of the state, but they are small compared to the other two, even with the UofO and OSU).

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      1. Then the Romans conquered the Greeks and appropriated all the Greek culture they could, so they probably considered him Roman by right of plunder. They did that a lot.

        How’s that for covering my error?

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        1. Most people attribute it to Marcus Aurelius, who included it in his Meditations. He got it from Epictatus, who borrowed it from Heraclitus, probably.

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        3. (collective Legion voices)

          “We are Rome. You will be assimilated into our society. Your culture will be absorbed into the glory that is Rome. Resistance is futile.”

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  19. I feel this in my bones. I moved a few hundred miles away from my hometown, stayed there for the better part of a decade, and then moved back to the area, but not as far east.

    Nothing is as I remember it. Most of the cute little stores on “Main Street” are gone, bought up by corporate developers, demolished, and replaced with post-modern eyesores that house soulless chain stores on the ground floor and overpriced apartments upstairs. The strip mall has likewise been revamped: the quirky local places are all gone, driven out when the owner decided there was more money to be gained from national chains. Nearly all of the stands in the local farmers market are gone, replaced by new, unrecognizable ones. My old neighborhood is barely recognizable: the transition from modest single-family homes to McMansions that barely fit on the plot of land was underway well before we moved, but is almost complete now. My childhood home is one of the few holdouts, but even it’s been changed dramatically by the family that now owns it.

    I can’t go back there anymore. My having never really fit in there aside (wrong politics, wrong temperament), it’s just too heart-rending to see how much has changed and how much of my childhood has been lost forever. Driving down the main street, or down my block, is an exercise in crushing sadness and depression.

    The area where I live now is also very different from how I remember. I’ve only lived here for a little over a year, but I used to visit regularly when I was a child. My earliest memories were of nothing but farmers’ fields, horse & buggies, a steam train, and the small retirement community where my grandparents moved. You could drive for nearly an hour and not see a single building. Now the main roads are lined with housing developments and strip malls; the steam train has become touristy and “kiddie-fied,” and the small retirement community is now a sprawling complex. The horse & buggies are still here, though for how much longer I can’t say.

    I fully recognize the hypocrisy of saying this (since the places I’ve lived since moving back wouldn’t exist if I had my way, so I probably wouldn’t have been able to live here at all), but I want the world from my childhood back. I don’t really recognize the world I’m living in now, and I don’t really care for it all that much.

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  20. I remember driving past my grandmother’s house, there one week, the next week a hole in the ground, and the next time I saw it a business complex with a parking lot.

    Two years ago I sold my parents’ house. They have a picture of it when it was just finished, with nothing but sand for miles. When I left it was 50 feet from a 5 lane road and the golf course had just been rezoned for high density housing, one of only a few areas left in the city that weren’t completely developed.

    From a town of 5000 people to nearly 100k in 50 years. I was there, but I still don’t fit. I grew out of it without ever leaving.

    For a while after leaving I dreamed about the house, empty, decaying, sometimes burning. Useless. It was comforting to learn that a family has moved in, that the greenhouse and garden boxes still stand, that the food forest is still there even if no one knows what it is.

    I will probably never go back. I don’t belong there anymore.

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    1. My husband’s home town of Lemon Grove CA, outside of San Diego. Or used to be. Now his HS has a multi-lane freeway separating the HS building from the sports fields (under freeway access, we think). He’ll never go back.

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  21. I used to live in a suburb of a major city in the Midwest. Left there in 1970 for college, and after a couple of summers, Mom sold the house and moved to another one nearby. I had worked at the local hardware store, and one brother at the bakery. When I’d visit, I’d try to go through the village (they refused to call it a “town”, it was “the village”–not sure if Number 6 would have liked it) and see what’s changed or stayed the same.

    Some things remained. The hardware store is still there, though the owner I worked for is long retired or passed away. His son is a hair younger than me, so might be retired. The bakery still has the owner’s name on it. So that’s the same. Some other businesses still exist sort-of unchanged.

    The new bits are jarring. The town village was dry in the ’60s, but there’s now a couple of brew pubs downtown. The churches seem to be the same; it was and is a magnet for Catholic executives with larger families (we were among the poorer families in town); lots of old, big houses. Most jarring is a Starbucks. I don’t know why, but it just seems wrong there.

    I don’t plan to return; I refuse to fly and it’s way more than I’m willing to drive now. The village can change and remain in peace.

    Our old house is still there, though somebody turned the attic into (cramped) living space. Man cave or adult refuge from the kids, perhaps?

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  22. And here I sit in my grandma’s house, which is worn out and stained – but otherwise unchanged. Many of the trees outside have gotten bigger, some have died of drought and fallen over, but her wisteria and lilacs are still here. The same chicken coop where I fed her chickens when I was 12 is still out there in the yard, if needing repairs. I’m slowly fixing and cleaning so we can live here to take care of my mom for however long she’s with us.

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  23. After my aunt’s funeral last spring, my father and I stopped at my grandparents farm. No one lives in the house or uses any of the buildings but the land is rented out.

    The last person to live there was a mentally ill hoarder and my grandmother’s spotless home was full of garbage waist high. It was horrific. I’m sorry it saw it.

    The distance from the front gate of the house to the barn was way shorter than I remembered and the barn was much smaller. No doubt the dairy cows would have seemed miniature as well. This I expected, but not the garbage and rats. Sad.

    At least there were no killer leg horn roosters to ambush me on the way to the barn, although I remained, as always, on high alert for such an attack.

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    1. Before the property sold again in 2015, we’d stopped at mom’s folks place on our way home from the annual cemetery spring clean up. We were shocked. The house which the buyer in 2006 had gutted down to the studs, insulated, fixed the rot in the house, and restored, as it was, with a couple of nice additions (enclosed laundry with powder room off it). Had been gutted (stripped), again. Extra appliances out back with 3′ high grass, and poison oak and blackberries, covering the west, north, and east, sides of the house to the roof. It was heartbreaking to see. Yes, the house, before their deaths in ’06, needed to be badly repaired (okay, torn down). It was an early 1900 shack. No insulation. Hadn’t had any repairs in forever (don’t blame family, we couldn’t touch a thing) and were lite hoarders (yes, hoarded, but have seen pictures of a lot worse).

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  24. We live not in places, but in slices of places and time. Before and after us, others possess places we love and live in them their way.

    I need only to drive around this city where I’ve lived for the past 45 years to know the truth of this.

    But in happier news, Casa Bonita is restored, revived, and doing a land office business!

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  25. Apparently, there was a recent remake of “the Crow”. It bombed, bigly.

    So many movies lately have bombed that Hollywood is being renamed

    “Operation Linebacker II”

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  26. I lived in the same house for over 40 years (because you can’t live in Commiefornia on a single income and I refused to play roommate roulette). I was brought home from the hospital to that house. You could sedate me and put me anywhere, and when I woke up I could tell you which room I was in by the way it sounded and smelled. It was a real wrench to leave it. The surroundings (with a few exceptions for new folks moving into old houses) had barely changed the whole time, as we lived up in the mountains, in a no-subdividing-lots area. The only people who wanted to live there were people who liked the privacy and the isolation. The three redwoods we liked to climb as kids are still there at the top corner of the property. You could still hike down into the canyon and sit beside the little stream and listen to the wind in the trees. The very sameness of it is probably what made the sudden change to a new state/city/home so traumatic.

    Now I live closer to town and can actually watch the change in real-time, and it’s occasionally mind-blowing. The housing developments are popping up like mushrooms after a storm.

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  27. I’ve done a few trips back to where I was born and raised. For all of its sins, I grew up in the SF Bay Area in the ’80s and ’90s and it wasn’t insane. It wasn’t mad.

    I could remember walking around most of San Francisco, in the evenings, and as long as I avoided the really bad parts of town, I was in good shape.

    Letting the homeless take dumps on the street and in the doorways of companies was a disgrace most cities were trying to resolve., not “just a price of doing business.”

    And what do I miss the most? I miss the people I knew.

    Quite a few have left to other places. Seattle is popular, as well as Portland. The moving disaster is there, but not quite as deep as here.

    Some to the East Coast.

    Some have not left…but have changed. Warped. Become people that I fear when I am close to them. To become close to them again would require me to explain myself to them-and I am a pilgrim in the middle of Hell. A Hell that many of these people made and support, if only by not trying to stop the worst atrocities.

    I miss so much these days. Certain certainties. Small promises that may never be honored again. All of it being torn down and destroyed to make a “new world” that has been forever promised by the acolytes of Moloch.

    And all to the beat of a screaming mentally-ill genderqueer teenager who demands “muh diversity!”.

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    1. Cities run by Democrats/leftists will always get worse; the only difference is the speed at which they do so. NYC is the least safe that it has ever been, and that includes what is considered to be the bad ol’ days

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    1. If “The U.S. has undue influence over the U.N. due to funding 22% of the U.N. budget” the solution is simple and obvious. Decline the funding. Presto! Problem solved; no more ‘undue influence’.

      Oh, they still want us to pay, but we have no say in how they spend our money?

      It’s no mistake that Michael Z. Williamson made the U.N. the villains of ‘Freehold’.

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  30. Buildings that no longer exist….peopled by ghosts….ancestors who are nothing but a picture and a single newpaper article, less real than a game or anime character.

    Yet….the dream house fades and ghosts grow still and silent….however…

    Our grandson already shows physical and personality quirks of his male line, his mothers line plus some other assorted ancestors.

    The world around us decays and falls but we are ever renewed. This is hope

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    1. I was named after my paternal grandmother. She died when my father was still a young teen, so I never knew her. For many, many, many years she was just a name, maybe a faded photograph. Until my aunt spotted me tatting a lace bookmark one day and remarked that her mother had tatted as well. It was a sudden connection that hadn’t been there before.

      Change is inevitable, and necessary for growth, but remembering the past gives us a foundation and direction for our growth. In order to move forward, you have to have not just a destination, but also a starting point. Otherwise, how do you know how far you have come?

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  31. Pingback: Walking on the moon,,, | Dio's Workshop

  32. I thought the post was a bit depressing; “melancholic” perhaps. Then I read the comments! I would be depressed, but for whatever reason this sort thing doesn’t bother me.

    The last time I was in Wisconsin, I drove past my grandparents’ house. It’s still there, but the yard is very different (outbuildings gone, garden gone). I go back to the family home every five years or so (2025 is my 40th H.S. reunion, so next year). That area is very different – but it’s been 40 years. Of course it’s different.

    I think I’m a child of my times. I expect growth and change. I expect people to move around and lose touch with each other. I expect relationships to change. This isn’t the 16th century, which was just like the 14th century, which was just like the 12th century when my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was doing the same job that I am.

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  33. Anita B. Gorman is an icon of Kansas City, MO, her name plastered on fountains and monuments and civic improvements. She is one of those “first woman to” types whose name can still move political mountains. With her name all over so many things, the wife and I just assumed she had to be dead. So we were almost shocked to find out she was still alive when we started attending Avondale United Methodist Church over 17 years ago. She was still alive, and though I only got to hear her speak in person a few times ( at the church-sponsored book club where we became regulars and she attended infrequently) I found her comments deep and insightful. Though never a personal friend, I was told by others who knew her, that while I was attending there she told others I was her favorite soloist in church and she wanted to hear me sing more often. (She didn’t use her influence, however, to stop the church from kicking . me out 2 years ago with a pack of lies and fabricated admissions on my part). She still lives, and despite all of the liberal transformations she helped make, and have been made in her name, recently told a common acquaintance: “I have seen a lot of changes in my lifetime – and I have been against every one of them.”

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  34. My home street is pretty much the same. The trees have gotten taller; a few have died and gotten chopped down. The surrounding farm fields are a nursing home, a townhouse complex, and an entire plat of houses and apartments. And yet… it’s really not all that different.

    The house a few blocks away from my apartment, that had to cut down the mimosa tree when the street was widened?

    That guy planted another mimosa, just a little further back from the street.

    I like that guy.

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    1. Nice. Most of the trees that have departed from places I’ve known were either ill-considered mass plantings (Modesto Ash is a lovely tree that is very prone to mistletoe, for example) or just aged out. Sacramento—one of the official City of Trees that gained its name from civic-minded 19th-century types who thought ahead—is having to consider that most of those trees are now at the point where large die-offs are going to be happening, whether from Dutch Elm disease, drought, or windstorms. So someone has actually mentioned that they need to start planning the new rounds of plantings.

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  35. The Reader had reason recently to go back to the Northern Neck of VA (for the geographically challenged it is the peninsula between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers) where his grandparents lived and his father grew up (researching a piece of property that was a leftover issue from his father’s estate – long story for another time). The Reader spent time there during several summers growing up in the 60s. The last time he was there was for his grandmother’s funeral in 1983. At that time the major town (Kilmarnock) was little changed from what it had been in the 60s and based on pictures for at least 20 years before that. This time was different. All of the practical local stores on Main Street had been gentrified sometime in the 90s but were now fading. The Reader struck up a conversation with a couple of local folks his age at the coffee shop. They shared that the population of the area has been stable but that it is aging out. Fewer young people are staying in the area. It was kind of sad.

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  36. Dear Mrs. Hoyt,

    Could you set a story there? You have a gift for taking the reader to the places you describe and making them beautiful. Never in a million years would I have imagined falling in love with the U.S. Western desert. But Goldport! It’s been a huge help in finding a new home here.

    I’m drawing it. I’m going to tweak our magical cartoon ‘verse to include High Desert when my writer can write again. It’s helping me manage the fallout from the move from my heart’s home.

    It’s messed with my art, my mind, my health – all the things. The grave of my home. Because I know, I’ll lose it one day, like you lost Portugal.

    BTW have I thanked you yet for your Christmas stories? You nailed that loss. BIG nails.

    My parents loved visiting Portugal, in the Before Times. 2nd favorite place nearly tied with No. Italy. So yeah. Right to question it.

    (*my before times start a few years before the Mass Covid Panic)

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  37. I was an Air Force brat, and our family moved every few years. I never had a long-term home as a young child, so I don’t have quite that sort of memories of place. There are some places, though, that I’ve seen change as an adult that gives me a slight hint of what it would be like to see those changes through a lifetime. The longest term was living in a small town in central Texas. When I moved there, it was an unincorporated village with one stoplight. When I moved away some 23 years later, it was an incorporated town with two or three times the population and three or four stoplights.

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  38. Video games again.

    A Chinese video game developer just released a new game – Black Myth Wu Kong. It’s apparently based on the classic Chinese novel “The Journey to the West” (considered one of the four big novels of Chinese literature), though I don’t know how closely it adheres to the original story. Several months ago I saw a gameplay preview (Wu Kong fighting a dragon over a body of water – a familiar scene if you’ve read the novel), and it looked quite good – at least in the part that was shown.

    The game came out this week, and the player opinion has been overwhelmingly on the positive side. The game got a boost in China because it’s a Chinese-made game, and the Chinese are often nothing if not China-boosters. But the game has also done very well with players in other parts of the world. It’s safe to say that it’s a fun game.

    Another game was released this week, this one by a French publisher – Quantic Dream (or more specifically, its the “Spotlight by Quantic Dream” sub-brand). Dustborn has you lead a music group across a “Divided States of America”, and opens with a musical number that is reportedly (I haven’t seen any videos of the game myself) quite openly woke, and openly hostile to anyone who doesn’t agree with such sentiments. Large parts of the gameplay apparently revolve around persuading others to do as you would like them to do. For example, at one point you use the “Bully” ability to persuade one of the other members of your crew to do something that he doesn’t want to do. Other abilities that you acquire include things like “Cancel” and “Gaslight”.

    No, this is not a parody. Yes, this game plot is completely serious, as I’ve been told by those unfortunates who played through the entire thing in order to warn us about just how bad it is.

    Also, at least three different governments – two European (Norway is one, iirc), and the US – helped to finance this abomination.

    It’s cratering in sales, and cratering *hard*, despite the fact that it retails for about half the price of Black Myth Wu Kong.

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    1. A quick search discovers that it’s getting the reviews you would expect from the usual suspects.

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  39. The fog was thick this evening, an older couple was walking down the street, they were not strangers to the city, but a lot had changed since the last time they were here and they got lost. It wasn’t hard, neighborhoods evolve, change over the years. What once was a safe neighborhood was no longer safe. The thug jumped out of the alley a weapon in his hand, before he could say anything.
    “Moose and Squirrel” the mature woman said with a noticeable accent.
    “Wha…” the thug started to say.
    The man pulled out a taser and zapped the guy, he went down without a fight. The man picked up the weapon and put it in his companions knitting bag where it clinked against several other weapons.
    “It’s just not how I remember it” She said.
    “Oh, I don’t know, not running for your life with bullets crashing into everything around you is kind of nice” he replied, reloading the taser.
    “If we get any more you’ll have to carry the bag” she said.
    “Yes Dear” he said with a smile.
    “No I mean it, you’ve had all the fun so far” she chastised him.
    “Well dear I would let you carry the taser, but you keep shooting people in the groin” he winced.
    “Well at least they’ll be alive, cooked gonads of not” she replied.
    “The police appreciate that dear, but roasting some guys nuts because he is stupid doesn’t some how seem like justice” he said.
    “Bag” she said as she held the bag to him.
    “Yes, dear” he said taking the bag and handing her the taser.
    “Remember dear, you have to say Moose and Squirrel” she smiled.

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    1. ….

      (later)

      ”Gimmie your wallet!”

      ”Moose and Squirrel.”

      ”Say what?”

      ”Ride The Lightning.”

      ”Say whaPOOTKRACKLE!AAAAAAIIIIIIIIAAAIAIIIIIIIII!!!!!EEEEEEE!!!!…”…thud

      ”…Bag.”

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Christy’s a commie. Sings songs about the commie side in the Spanish Civil War and all. Born rich of course, his father was a banker if I remember correctly.

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  42. When my mom was teaching Freshman English at a nearby university, she had a theme she set her students after their first trip back home from college. “You Can’t Go Home Again—Home Has Changed, or You Have.” She said she got some very interesting writing from her students. The guy who’d been THE big sports star in high school said that yeah, people remembered him and were glad to see him—but they were all talking about this new kid who was burning up the gridiron, the basketball court and the wrestling mat. The girl who’d been THE reigning beauty found that there was a new girl wearing her former crown. And so on.

    My dad told me about a lot of his Greek friends. (Before I was born and when I was little, he was practically an honorary Greek—he’d made friends with the Greek restaurant owner in our town, and all the Greek community ended up coming to him for law help.) He told me that a very common pattern was a young guy coming over in the early 1920s (before we wisely slammed the gates mostly shut) planning to make some money in the US and retire to his beautiful Greek village. However, circumstances prevented that—first the Depression, then World War II. After the war, he found he had reasons to stay on—he had a restaurant of his own that needed his management, he’d somehow or other acquired a wife and children, and so on. But all the while, he would be sighing for his beautiful Greek village. After he retired, though, he would go back to Greece, rejoicing—to find that his beautiful Greek village, after thirty or so years in the States, looked (and SMELLED!) like a medieval backwater. The people he remembered were either dead or had changed beyond recognition, a lot of them didn’t recognize him at first, he found that his Greek had acquired a distinct American accent in his years here, and everybody called him “‘o Amerikanos”—“the American.” After a year or two, he’d slink back Stateside, bitterly disappointed but wiser.

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    1. “There’s a New Kid in Town,” by the Eagles uses that theme, as the singer first is the new kid, and then is dethroned by a new kid.

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    2. Once talked with an Englishwoman who had married an American and when she divorced, decided not to go back. (She still didn’t like American tea. I asked her whether she thought we had thrown it in the harbor for nothing.)

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  44. I hate not having my cats and my ROUTINE. I like waking up and having my food, and my coffee and petting my cat

    I understand this. If both C and I are traveling my separation anxiety hits before I’m at the end of the block.

    If she’s at home while I travel I might make it two days. Last SJW I left Thursday morning and made it to Friday morning before I wanted to be home with the boys.

    Now with the little girls I’m not sure I’m up to an overnight trip.

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