A bend in a river, an orchard, a weed-wild lot where a house once stood, a gash in a tree.

Typically, we pass by such mundane features of the landscape without thinking about them. Not much flash and bang in the ordinary. Yet, odds are, an event, or events important to someone happened at the ordinary places.

We inhabit, visit such places for a time, endow them with our memories, spin off fragments of our lives, and move on. That’s what we tell ourselves. But what do we really leave behind?

The problem, of course, is that outside of artifacts, museum records, stark white crosses along roadsides, and living memories in aging heads now fading at the margins, most places are mute.

A stack of grey boards near a giant oak is all that remains of a house. But kids, now men and women, grew up there. They had stories to tell.

That gash in the tree? That’s all that remains of a fatal accident.

T.S. Eliot captured my feelings about all of this in The Four Quartets:

“Ash on an old man’s sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspended

Marks the place where a story ended.

Dust inbreathed was a house-

The walls, the wainscot and the mouse…”

That’s what’s left to us.

I first began to think about during a tour of the Cold Harbor Battlefield in Virginia in 1976. There, still visible in the weeds, were entrenchments dug in 1864 by soldiers of once great armies that have been out of existence for more than 160 years.

It struck me then that we know a lot about the armies that fought there, but about the particular hands that hollowed this or that section of entrenchment as protection against the relentless fire, we know nothing. Only that their remains lie somewhere, under stone and marble markers with incised lettering worn away by time and the elements.

Questions haunt me still.

Years ago, passing what once had been a farm on the Green Valley Road, I wondered what the field, at that moment ablaze with the red, yellow and blue flowers of high summer, would say if it could tell a tale of two about the people who once lived there.

Just last week, walking along Auburn’s East Main Street, I felt the past and its people all around me. Over there was where the old Jungleland pet store on East Main used to be, where our mother took us to marvel at the parrots and neon tetras, and hopefully to visit the doughnut shop next door. But in this case, “used to be” was more than 50 years ago, in a building destroyed by fire in 2021.

From time to time, I pause to look at what once was the North Auburn Elementary School playground, now Dick Scobee Elementary. Just an ordinary field, nothing much to draw the eye. But when I consider it with the eyes of the kid I was, growing up on 16th Street Northeast, it was just about everything to me. I practically grew up on that field, playing football, baseball and whiffle ball with my brothers and friends.

Of course, all of the players have since moved on, but many names have joined a list that grows longer each year, like my big brother Jim, Craig Cogger, Smythe, Fleck, now passed.

Funny how memory works. I don’t remember much about the games, but I remember Brian Tsujkawa, pushing through a wire fence in back of his family’s property on I Street Northeast, north of Old Lady Grant’s spooky barn, glove in hand, hopeful to join in the game.

All of that is a part of me, even if it never finds a place in a museum.

As John Lennon sang:

“There are places I remember

All my life, though some have changed

Some forever not for better.

Some have gone, and some remain.

All these places had their moments

With lovers and friends, I still can recall

Some are dead and some are living.

In my life, I loved them all.”

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.