Memories

"What's Your Rush, Pardner?" BY ESTHER HENDERSON Memories

An old cabin forgotten by the wayside has the dignity of remembering. Here are recalled scenes of yesterday. The thoughtful wayfarer pauses in his journey to consider the decades that have passed and wonder about the people whose lives were entwined in those decades in these lonesome places. The wind rattles the loose boards and plays a dirge in sagging eaves. If there are such things as ghosts, you will find them here in the silence and moonlight, apparitions from more animated days.

Of the people who were here and who have gone - who can tell? The living have become the dead. All their tears and laughter, their joys and heartaches, their hopes and their sorrows have been erased by time. The warped boards, the battered chair, the crumbling porch are footnotes in their story known only to the lizards who dart by in the sunlight. Perhaps in the very end the lizards alone will be triumphant.

There are memories in old and unused things. The little village bypassed by the world, the lumbering wheel once used on ore wagons, the rickety fence leaning under the weight of many yesterdays are in one way inanimate relics of another life; yet each has a story to tell to the beholder, each conjures memories of the people concerned with them.

The wheel tells us of sweating mule teams, the crack of the mule driver's whip, of ore shipments that were not as rich as the dreams men dreamed, of man's greed and ambition and the dark wells of man's despair. The village tells us of a changing world, the world of travel and commerce which sought other and easier channels to fulfill the mandates of profit. But when the world passed the village it was the world's loss, not the village's.

There are memories in decayed, forlorn and forgotten places and things. They tell of people and people, no matter how long ago they have gone, people good and bad, all have their stories worthy of remembering... R. C.