Section I. Homecoming.

Places and their memory sustain us in our everyday lives, subject as these lives are to fragmentation and rupture of so many sorts (Casey, 198).

I am sitting at the old wood table of Miss Susan’s house, the rhythmic ticking of the clock the only noise for this minute. As soon as the door opens, it will be dogs and people, but for now, there is near silence. My sweatshirt is covered in hay, and bits of hay are stuck to my legs, having somehow gotten between my jeans and my riding pants. My hands smell like dust and horse hair, and my nails are dirty, but the kitchen is pleasantly warm and smells like clean laundry, dogs and lemon. The two old dogs are asleep in the house; Bookie, the terrier, doesn’t move from his white bed, but Tuppence, the ancient Airedale, moves her head and sighs, groans a little in the slow dragging of her head up from the floor. It is only five-thirty, but the windows are black.
An hour ago, I sat bareback on a new horse, a grey-and-white paint quarter horse named Smokey Joe. We were in the blue-stone ring up by the house, at first walking around as I got to know him; he had a barrel like a couch, and if I’d wanted, I could have lain on his neck and been safe. But he also had the energy and curiosity of the ten-year-old he was, and as we moved around the perimeter, he would stop to nuzzle horses in the surrounding fields, or to look at something interesting, before picking up his pace again. The ring is bordered on three sides by fields and on the fourth side by the long driveway. At the back of the fields that border Clarksburg road is a thicket of trees, and beyond the trees are the faintest hint of purple mountain, a small stretch of the Appalachians not visible just a few miles closer to the city than we are located. Once we had warmed up our muscles and gained each other’s trust, I asked for a trot, and was amazed by the smoothness of the gait; bareback, I did not bounce at all, and, happy, I asked for the canter. Cantering is the sort of pure joy and freedom that was lost to the automobile; going ninety in a car, no matter how flashy, is nothing to going thirty on a horse, hearing the one-two-three rhythm, more graceful than a waltz, breathing in dust, feeling at once the power of the muscles and the dangerous closeness of the ground below. It does not matter, this time, that we are in a ring and not on an open trail; as we run forward, the fence-line we turn along is meaningless, we are only and always going forward. As I rode, we watched the low clouds turn a deep purple, pink frames emerging at the edges, until the pink tint spread to cover the bottom of the sky and the dark purple settled as a layer over the pink, the clouds fading from view.
Finishing my ride (it had been over three months for me, so I was tired out well before Smokey), I walked the round-bellied paint down to the barn; first, across the black driveway lined on either side by well-grazed grass, then to the old wooden fence enclosing the barnyard and opening to yet another field—vines grow along one side of the fence, and a small tomato plant nestles in a corner—through the small wooden gate and then, because he was cool and because it was not yet time for dinner, along the fence-line to the field, where I took off his bridle and let him go.
Below us lies the barn itself. Two parts, connected by a small aisle and all roofed in tin, with a small tack/feed shed attached at the front, and a large black water trough by the shed. (Now, the younger Airedales, Rosie and Bella, are inside barking, running back and forth between the kitchen and the bedroom, play fighting, bothering the old Airedale, Tuppence, before falling silent, settling into the tone of the house at nightfall). All of the horses and ponies (save for one paint, Peppy, back from a trail ride and being groomed by his girl, Kaci), are out. I clean the leather bridal, hang it in the tack room. The shed is small, maybe six feet by eight. When you enter from the door, the opposite wall holds a medicine cabinet, a white-board with feeding instructions, and several odds and ends. To the right is a wall covered in saddle racks, all the leather saddles covered in blue and red saddle-blankets. To the left are three large tin feed-bins containing the various forms of feed, and the back wall holds a low blue trunk full of saddle pads, above which hang about a dozen bridle hooks. I hang Smokey’s bridle on the hook nearest the door, the same high metal hook on which I nearly lost an eye three or four summers before. My tack put away (I don’t know when I last used a saddle), I enter the barn and go to the “hayloft,” a sort of large closet of hay held in by a wide metal gate. To the right are six large stalls, three facing towards the barnyard and the house, and three facing towards the back of the barnyard and the field below it, beyond which now stand McMansions flanked by cool blue pools.
Towards the left of the hayloft is an aisle, which leads to the second part of the barn structure, the area we’ve always called the “Pony Palace.” Now, it holds more horses as the demographics have changed, but all the stalls are smaller, closer together. There are the five at the very back, and the four in the middle, creating two small aisles with dust for floors, and a total of three at the very front of the palace, two on one side of the wide connecting aisle and one on the other. The name-plates on the doors, all of them carved into small rectangles of wood, only sometimes match the stall’s current resident. The name-plate reading “Buster-Brown” has moved several times over the last few years, and currently adorns one of the middle-row stalls of the Pony Palace. “Hello Kitty,” once markered onto a sign and decorated with a foam cut-out of the cartoon, is next to his, and “Step’n’Time,” the sign adored with a small carving of a horse-head, is on the stall across.
I climb to the top of the rather depleted stack of hay, grab the top bale, and toss it to the ground. I jump down and get the blade from the hook, hanging as always from a piece of orange twine. Although it is dark by this point, and I have not been to the barn in months, I know where everything is. I cut the orange twine tying the flakes of hay together, and walk through the barn distributing hay amongst all the stalls. Next is feed; I fill a bucket with a mix of the round, rich, brown pellets of Senior and the longer tan pellets of Trotter, then deliver scoops to all the stalls, two for some and one for others.
Done with my work, I walk up towards the house. I can see a couple of stars. A few years ago, when the land-clearing had started but the houses had not yet come in, you could see them the way you can see stars in the country. One of the many summer nights I stayed over, I slept outside, my sleeping bag on the pavement, still warm from the sun, and watched a meteor shower in silence. I am sure there were crickets, but the dogs were silent, the horses were asleep, and the area was not yet populated enough for the road to really be in use past eleven. All I can remember is the warm pavement, the exhaustion from another hot, humid, day of work, and the sky, watching the occasional meteor. I saw a handful that night, probably more than I had ever seen at once. Now, I could see two stars distinctly. I know more will be out, but the sky does not blanket itself anymore, now that there are lights always on in some or other of the many identical houses.

One of the most eloquent testimonies to places’ extraordinary memorability is found in nostalgia…Post haste in short! (Casey 201).

This return “home,” from which I began my exploration, was brief and came after many months away (the prior visits had, too, been brief, for I no longer remain in the area long enough to devote myself to any of its many life-central places). Yet—or perhaps because of this—it was powerful, extraordinarily healing of the many wounds and anxieties of the outside world. As Casey says, the powerful phenomenon of nostalgia “has everything to do with the memory of place” (201), and connects to a place’s ability to contain the so-called “past” in a way abstract memory, or as Pierre Nora discusses, general history, cannot. The act of returning, and the act of once again interacting bodily with the place (grooming, riding) carried with it all the memories contained by the place, and the experience solidified itself in the ever-growing history, or memory, of Clarksburg.