Venersborg, Washington, where I grew up, is a loosely-organized rural community on the side of a smallish mountain, about thirty miles southwest of Mount St. Helens. When I was a kid it was just a few farms scattered among the trees, with unpaved dirt and gravel tracks for roads. Venersborg had been settled by Swedish immigrants about sixty years earlier; later some Finns joined the mix, along with a few odds and ends like my parents. There was one church and one store. The store was almost always closed.
My parents' house was at the end of the road, literally. Just past our driveway, there was a chain across the road. Past that chain, you could see some wheel ruts running up the hillside, and that was it.
It was sold soon after my mother's death in 1999. I've gone up there with Partner once or twice since, just to take a look at it from the road.
It's different now.
All of the old trees are gone. There used to be Gravenstein apple trees dating back to the 1940s (to be fair, they were scraggly and old and covered with lichen when I was a kid, they'd probably have died of natural causes by now), and a couple of nice old pear trees, and a huge Royal Ann cherry that attracted birds by the hundreds. And my parents planted all kinds of trees – blue spruce, pine, cedar – around the house when it was new. There were too many, and by the 1980s the house got almost no sunlight at all, but they were beautiful trees.
And all of my mother's huge rhododendrons are gone, and the camellia she loved so much, and her roses.
I look at it sometimes on Google Earth. The new owners have built it up enormously; it looks like a functioning farm now, which is what my father really always wanted (he'd grown up on a farm, and spent evenings and weekends fooling around with his five acres of hay and a couple of cattle and a vegetable garden).
When I look at it online, I feel like a disembodied spirit, looking at it from above. It makes me want to reach down and touch it.
And then I can drift across the map, a mile or two away, to the Venersborg Cemetery, where Mom and Dad are both buried, and one of my sisters.
The image is so clear that you can see the gravemarkers on the ground.
Ah, me, kids.
It all goes by so quickly, doesn't it?
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