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Water from another time
I'm in the process of planning a weekend visit to Ithaca. It's not actually the main part of what I'm planning. It's really just the tail end of a vacation to New Orleans, some interesting details of which I'm sure I'll share when I return. But it's the part that's on my mind right this second. I'm writing an actual paper check and mailing it to a B&B out past Ithaca College, to an address that's just past where some friends from my old Morris dancing team lived.
I lived in Ithaca from 1990 till 1996. It was originally just a short stop after a somewhat abortive grad school experience, but I never quite ended up leaving. Not always in the same place. We tended to move yearly, from out by the airport to right into the middle of downtown to up on the top of one of the big hills, where we rented a whole house, with a vegetable garden in the summer and car-destroying snow in the winter.
Ithaca for me had a sense of community like no other place I ever experienced. People knew you on the street. Sometimes people you didn't know smiled and waved at you, maybe by mistake and maybe because they were just in a good mood, and you smiled back. In 1998, two years, after I moved out, I went to the Ithaca Festival, and people stopped me in the street to give me a hug and find out what I was doing, as if I'd never left. I think some of them didn't know I *had* left, just thought I'd dropped out of their circles for a bit. It's that kind of a place. I used to walk to work sometimes, to choir practice, to the waterfall where I used to occasionally skinnydip if it wasn't too busy.
Metro New York just isn't that way. The character of this place is isolationist at heart.
I'm very, very nostalgic about Ithaca.
Things change slowly there, but they do change, I'm sure. It's been a while, and I'm probably going to get a chance to see a friend or two from way back when, but most of them have moved away. I don't know if being there will make my heart sing, or my heart sink. I'm going to be showing some people around, and I don't know what will be unfamiliar because I've a poor memory, and what will be unfamiliar because it's changed, and what will be unfamiliar because I've changed.
They say that your body completely renews itself every seven years, that all of your cells will be replaced in that time. It's been about that long since I've lived in Ithaca. They say you can't go home again, and that town was as much a home as any I've ever had. I can only hope that in my time there, I left a little bit of a legacy of love. And I plan to smile at a few people in the street, whether I know them or not. I hope they smile back.
I lived in Ithaca from 1990 till 1996. It was originally just a short stop after a somewhat abortive grad school experience, but I never quite ended up leaving. Not always in the same place. We tended to move yearly, from out by the airport to right into the middle of downtown to up on the top of one of the big hills, where we rented a whole house, with a vegetable garden in the summer and car-destroying snow in the winter.
Ithaca for me had a sense of community like no other place I ever experienced. People knew you on the street. Sometimes people you didn't know smiled and waved at you, maybe by mistake and maybe because they were just in a good mood, and you smiled back. In 1998, two years, after I moved out, I went to the Ithaca Festival, and people stopped me in the street to give me a hug and find out what I was doing, as if I'd never left. I think some of them didn't know I *had* left, just thought I'd dropped out of their circles for a bit. It's that kind of a place. I used to walk to work sometimes, to choir practice, to the waterfall where I used to occasionally skinnydip if it wasn't too busy.
Metro New York just isn't that way. The character of this place is isolationist at heart.
I'm very, very nostalgic about Ithaca.
Things change slowly there, but they do change, I'm sure. It's been a while, and I'm probably going to get a chance to see a friend or two from way back when, but most of them have moved away. I don't know if being there will make my heart sing, or my heart sink. I'm going to be showing some people around, and I don't know what will be unfamiliar because I've a poor memory, and what will be unfamiliar because it's changed, and what will be unfamiliar because I've changed.
They say that your body completely renews itself every seven years, that all of your cells will be replaced in that time. It's been about that long since I've lived in Ithaca. They say you can't go home again, and that town was as much a home as any I've ever had. I can only hope that in my time there, I left a little bit of a legacy of love. And I plan to smile at a few people in the street, whether I know them or not. I hope they smile back.
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-Sue
Hey, neighbor!