On my way back from Fall Creek Falls, I took the long way around through Sparta and Smithville. Just outside of Sparta is the community of Gum Springs which my mom grew up in. I had stopped there a handful of times and decided to spend 20 minutes of my time driving by my grandparent’s old house.
I managed to get there based soley on memories. No road maps. No knowledge of street names. Merely remembering the route I would travel almost every other weekend during the early elementary years of my life. The look of the fence at the turn off from Route 70, the small store across the street from my mom’s elementary school, the church where my parents were married, and the narrow road going to my grandparents’ farm….
From 1977 to up until my grandfather died in 1985, my parents would pack my sister up in our 1977 Volkswagen Beetle (later a 1982 VW Rabbit) and go to the farm to see my grandparents. Now, about 25 years later, here I was in my own Beetle driving along country roads of my childhood. I guess at times, history repeats itself.
The farmhouse is rented out to a family I don’t know. I paused briefly as I drove by it. It didn’t have as big of a yard as I remember it. Of course everything seems bigger when you are young. The electric fence which held the cattle had been dismantled. The only cattle in sight was across the street where my great-grandmother’s house once stood. Outside my grandparent’s house, a young girl played. I didn’t dare to stay too long, making myself at risk for being an outsider near private property.
The church where my parents were married hasn’t changed much. My mom says that membership has dwindled, probably loosing many of their members to larger churches within the town of Sparta itself. Rural churches as a whole are dying out.
As I drove along I found myself jealous of those resident’s lifestyle of rural culture. Sometimes I want to live in rural areas thinking that the slower lifestyle would make me happier.