You Can Take the Boy Out of Kansas

This past Thanksgiving my family headed with my parents east across the great Kansas rectangle to our ancestral town of Overbrook, Kansas. Overbrook is such a nondescript town that the name gets a red squiggly line under it from Microsoft Word and the town motto is a pleading "Don't Overlook Overbrook." Alas, most do.

The picture posted adjacent to this paragraph is of the first house I lived in in this town. We moved when I was six and lived there until shortly after I turned 10. It is a short amount of time, relatively speaking. Three, three-and-a-half years. But those years are incredibly formative in the life of a person. So it is a place that will always be special to me, always close to my heart.

After getting cabin fever at my grandparent's house the other evening Clara and I went for a walk. It does not take long to perambulate through most of the streets in the town and we made short work of the highlights. But when we got to this old house which I hadn't seen in a few years I unexpectedly teared up. This is not an altogether uncommon experience for me, but I was a bit taken aback. It was a weird feeling. I had a desire to be in the house again. Literally. (The temptation toward a minor case of B&E was mitigated by the presence of my wife). I wanted to play pickle in the side yard with my dad and brother; pop wheelies on the uneven sidewalk out front; climb as high as I dared in the trees between the sidewalk and the road; barricade myself behind the stone walls of the porch steps, fighting off Confederate soldiers as a proud Kansas Jayhawker; eat dinner in the beautiful dining room; sleep in a bunkbed in the back bedroom with my brother; watch the Royals on our wood-paneled television in the living room. And on and on. It's been 21 years since I was inside those walls but the place remains a part of me.

And maybe that's why I had to choke back tears. Because for a minute again I was an eight year-old boy playing around with my six year-old brother and my 33 year-old father and 30 year-old mother. Because the place hasn't changed all that much. The porch and steps are still red. The same swing still sways. The same trellises still guide the rose bushes. The same black trim still enwraps the windows.

I write about time a lot here. I write about the way in which the linearity of time--second leading to second; minute to minute; hour to hour; day to day; week to week; month to month; year to year; decade to decade until our death--can be broken. And this moment smashed it. The past 21 years were a non-factor. I was there in that yard in front of that building that housed my hopes and prayers and pains and joys. And for a time it still did. And in a way it always will.