You Can Go Home Again

Visiting the scene of a childhood

[Creek]

I visited the creek today
The smell is still the same
Seven years old and skinned knee
Climbing the banks
Easter morning,
breaking the rules
Coming home with algae
smeared on my dress

There is little time
between me and
you
Even now

How does a place hold onto so much?
The depth of the water
The slope of the tunnel that streams
from one end of town to the next
The light
It still ripples
The White Ash has turned chartreuse
Sun kissing color as the gnats swarm.

The amber leaf is following the current,
now faster, away from me
I thought about climbing in,
dipping my toe, but refrained
That’s not my role now
Mine is to hold the stones, the fronds,
the musk of molting leaves and November sun
That last gasp of lush life.

To remember.

I am of this place
You and me in it
Nothing can erase that
Not even time

---

I visited my mother this weekend and did something I do regularly when returning to the city: I drove out of my way to sit outside my childhood home, the one my mother sold more than 20 years ago.

I wanted to feel the familiar street sandwiched between Route 1 and the New Jersey Turnpike, the quiet hum of the highway, the neat yards and the creek at the end of the street where my brothers and I used to play, including one Easter morning when I slipped in the creek before mass.

I think. Honestly, I don’t remember the exact details of that day. Also, it turns out “the creek” is actually a brook, Mill Brook. But this is the kind of information you learn as an adult and quickly dismiss, because the creek will always be a creek and not a brook, and what are facts when you are chasing a feeling, a connection to the past, anyway?

The smell of the creek startled me. How is it that creek still smells the same despite everything that has changed? How is it I can stand there and immediately be transported back in time? How is it so much has changed? I thought of Oscar and Johanna, my childhood best friend who lived a block away and died last year as well. I thought of the last time I was in that house in 2000 and the person I was at that time, starting a new life and a new way of living, closing the door on the old. I watched that leaf float effortlessly along the stream, golden light warming the bank.

I took three deep breaths and then a car slowly drove past, the driver craning his head as he turned onto Mill Brook Road (“oh,” I thought, “a brook”). I gave him a neighborly wave and leaned against the railing and wrote this poem, because, after all, I was home.