Return to Lincoln Nebraska

I had not been back in many years. The whole location and the years I had spent there hung in my memory as though sealed in a glass ball. Everyone I had known had died or moved away. And yet the streets were full of beneficent ghosts as I walked along all the sidewalks that had been so familiar at one time. The things we remember without trying , that texture and shape of what life once was.

I suppose Lincoln was the first place I was an adult on my own. I arrived broken down and half mad with sorrow. And then I got better. The wind, the cold and the heat, the great enduring kindness and honor of the people, all those lengths of pavement I walked all over. I did not keep a car all the years I lived there. The houses back then usually had sapphire blue "tar paper" roofing that did my heart good to see. I first read Willa Cather and she seemed like a wise kind prairie woman, like the ones I've met, but who was saying things I needed to hear and could not yet understand. During this recent trip I bought used copies of her books and read them as I wandered about the city we both had known and it was like conversation across time.

Some of this may be an imaginative leap, some may just be the eternal glowing NOW in which we find all manner of stuff connecting. I don't know.