"The past is a great place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there."

Everything not in the present is in the past. I never wish to be there. Yet I often wonder if I am wishing my life away, always looking for what is to come, less back at what has been.

Recently I stayed at my cabin in Vermont for an overnight, for the first time in more than four years. We had bought it as our replacement for the Maine island 'get-away' family visited for almost a century but to which there was no longer access. A second inducement was that a son and his family lived a few miles away.

After a few years my son and family moved away and our lives back home became busy with hobbies, not easily portable. The upkeep of even a small rustic place became tedious, the battle with nature omnipresent. A place is less exciting when you no longer need to 'get away from it' or 'get to' it. The 225 mile drive was beautiful in all kinds of weather, but long and often dangerous in the winter. Visiting in the present was like coming home to a place that had become, 'just another place I occupied for a while'. The cabin engendered neither sadness nor joy. It was then I realized that a place is never as important as the people with whom one is surrounded. My life has changed and the community and I had moved on. The faces are younger. Places and people who were there are not there today.

I thought of a recent drive past my childhood home. It no longer exists and has been replaced by a village of fancy condominiums. Almost nothing is recognizable around there but a few street names. No matter, it lives in my memory. That which I have forgotten never existed unless someone reminds me and I bring it out of my brain's backup storage. New memories are always being tucked away. Once something is in the past and I can change nothing, it is put in storage. I sincerely believe that 'If one ignores history, one is doomed to repeat it'. I suppose some day they will slip away with the rest of my brain cells and then I will have no past. I used to think that was sad but now can see that, should that day come, I won't know the difference!