Home Again

                              Home Again

    Have you ever heard the expression - " you can never go home again " ?  Have you any idea what it means?  I have heard the saying many times from different sources and it has taken years for me to understand why I can't go home again. For many, home is your birthplace, the place where you grew up and family lives but with our ever-changing world, our "mobile" society, home has become a place most often found in the heart and mind of the beholder. The expression "home is where the heart is" now holds a truer meaning of home to many - myself included.
    My earliest memories ( they say you can remember farther back the older you get ) are of living in a house on Bledsoe St. in Gallatin, Tn.  There was Mom, brother Pat and me.  Dad was working the ships on the Great Lakes so he wasn't around much.  Aunt Addie and Uncle Harold were there a lot because Mom was sick a good bit.  I have been told that my first word was " Harold ".
    I also spent a good deal of time with Dad's parents on their farm across the river.  It was there that I tried to befriend a pig and was bitten for the effort.  I was about 2 - 3 at the time and still carry a large scar on my right hand.  It made no matter where we lived for the next few years, I spent most of my vacation time on the farm until I was 11 or 12.
    The farm wasn't much to look at but it was the life blood for Granny and Grandpa Riggan. The house was an old wood frame house with a sheet metal roof and it sat on small boulders at the corners for a foundation. The barn was no better but it protected the animals from the worst of the elements. The best thing about the farm was that my imagination could run to overflowing.  I played well by myself and could envision wild Indians behind every bush or feel as though I were flying while I hung on to a tree limb blowing in the wind. I did a lot of growing up on that farm and there are memories forever forged in the depths of my mind.  It was the only place from my youth that holds nothing but good memories.
    Dad came home from the lakes and drove a cab in Gallatin and at some point learned the butcher trade and we left Gallatin. The next place I recall was a block house built into the side of hill in Donelson.  It was like they built the basement and forgot to build the upstairs. The roof was flat and covered in tar paper and I played on it when it wasn't too hot. The house sat back off the road where Briley Pkwy and Lebanon Rd. meet today. Dad drove a little foreign car that we called a "doodlebug".
    When I started school we were living in Lagardo, Tn in an old wood frame house.  It was modern in that you could operate the well from the back porch. This was especially nice in wet weather as you wouldn't track mud in the house. There was an out house down a path in the back, a wood stove for cooking / heat,  and an ice box to keep the milk and butter cool if Dad remembered to bring home the block of ice.
    Pat and I played in fields that also grazed cows and we cooled off in the shallow creek during the summer. Bath time generally was every other day as it took quite the effort to draw buckets of water from the well and heat them on the stove so we could bathe in a wash tub. Needless to say Pat and I bathed in the same water.  I think Mom and Dad had sponge baths as they didn't fit in the wash tub.
     School was exciting.  It was held in a new brick school house that had three rooms.  One room held grades 1 - 6, another had grades 7 & 8, and then there was the auditorium / lunch room.  I was one of four students in the first grade and we shared our teacher with the other five grades. The playground had a swing set and a pile of dirt.  For toys we had pieces of 2x4's cut to different lengths and a 45 degree angle at the ends. The pieces of wood were used as bulldozers, trucks, cars ,etc. - imagination was essential to mental growth.
    The next year found us living in West Nashville.  Dad was now a full blown butcher and working for a local chain called Logans. The best thing about the house we lived in was the long hallway with wooden floors.  Pat and I wore out a few socks sliding from one end to the other.  I had a beautiful young teacher in the second grade and was head over heels in love with her.  I got my first bike for Xmas, it was used, repainted, and too big for me but I figured out how to ride it.  Brother Clint was just a baby and brother Pat was starting school.
     I started third grade at Donelson Elem.  My teacher, Mrs Webb,  had been one of Dad's teachers. We lived in a four room house on Colonial Circle ( actually there were five rooms if you counted the bathroom ).  A couple of times a week Mom would push the kitchen table aside and roll out the wringer washer and do laundry.  I learned to fold and iron clothes and put the pants stretchers in Dad's pants. I never understood why Dad had to have ironed handkerchiefs- he was going to stick them in his back pocket until he blew his nose in them and return them to the back pocket- made no sense to me. Sister Vickie has now entered the picture and brother Clint was old enough to be a pest and then along came brother Ronnie.  We were stacked in there like cord wood.
    I had some good times on Colonial Circle.  Friends and memories were in abundance but the house had become too small so we moved again to Tyler Dr. in Donelson. We now lived in a three bedroom brick house on the side of a hill.  Dad was the meat manager for C&S foods and I am starting Jr High.  This turns out to be my last year spending time on the farm with Granny and Pa Riggan .
     It wasn't long before one of Dad's drinking buddies ( Don Baker ) who happened to be in real estate sold Dad his first mortgage on a new home in Mt. Juliet,Tn.
     I was initially heart broken as I had a crush on a girl in school, but the fresh air of the rural setting of Mt Juliet took care of the heart ache.  It was almost as good as being on the farm - woods, fields, Cedar Creek and Old Hickory lake.  I soon became familiar with all aspects of the terrain. I would wander alone for hours and sometimes cover miles of woods and waterways. In the summer we ran barefoot and about half naked.  I was usually dressed in gym shorts and sometimes a T- shirt. My big toe seemed to have a perpetual scab from stubbing it on the rough tar and gravel road .  Here I went from boyhood to teenager and along the way experienced many of the trials and tribulations that life had to offer.  Some were good and some were not so good.
    I went to work as a sack boy at C&S, working weekends, holidays and summers.  For my labors I received 50 cents an hour.  About six months before I went into the Navy I was raised to 55 cents.
    We lived in Mt. Juliet for four years before Dad moved us to Hermitage Hills.  I finished my last year of high school at Mt Juliet but I did it riding back and forth to school with a teacher.
    May 5, 1965 I turned 18- that awkward age where you are no longer a kid and not yet an adult. In 1965, 18 year olds had to grow up fast.  There was a war on in a far away land called Vietnam and there was a need for young men who were ready to spread their wings. I joined the Navy.  They paid me a whopping $ 80 per month plus room and board. My world broadened, sometimes scary , sometimes exciting but I always had a place called home to come back to - or so I thought.
    I did come home on leaves and when Linda and I were married we spent our honeymoon meeting the family.  It was on these visits that little changes began to make themselves apparent.  Many of my friends had flown the nest and were scattered around the world.  Even when I came home after the Navy it wasn't the same.  Granny Riggan died and Pat, Clint and Vickie had their own lives.
    Eventually my career path took me to Fla., Calif., Ks. and Ga. and every  time I came home it seemed less like home. The family was still there but they were different - older, other interest, pressed for time and I was no different. The farm was now part of the Boy Scouts Camp Boxwell ( the only thing left is the out house and wellhead ).  The house in Mt Juliet burned and an A- frame stands in it's place. The houses where we lived in Donelson have new families in them creating their own memories. C&S is an auto parts store.
    Funerals became the venue for family gatherings. Dad died in 1985 and that started a cascade of funerals.  Two generations of Wades and Riggans are gone now except for Uncle Paul.  Clint and Ronnie still live in the Nashville area but the rest of us are scattered - Pat in Arizona, Vickie here in Ga. for the moment.  My home is now in Ga. because this is where my sons live. Their memories of the past mingle with mine to form a new generation.
    It took me years to truly understand why I could never go home again. I finally realized that life is a constant series of change,  subtle day to day changes.  Things you thought in your youth would never change are now distant memories of the past and the present becomes history in the blink of an eye. That big tree where I used to play in it's roots turns out to not be so tall to an old man, the hill in Donelson that was hard to pump the pedals of my bike to climb it is a mere bump in the road of my mind. The things my mind remembers are not as big or small as they used to be, the eyes of age see the truth of youth. 

     Home as I knew it is no more and never will be again except in my memories. This is why memories are so important, this is why it is so important to hold on to the past.  All it takes is a scent of honeysuckle, the sound of a distant train, or the smell of clean air after a cleansing rain and you will remember, you will know that home is where the heart is.