Returning to the crime scene

There was a horse and a pony that lived together in a field on a farm in the northern part of the state. The horse was huge, all legs and muscle; the pony was small and round, a miniature. They made an odd pair, but they loved each other and whinnied loudly whenever they were reunited after a few hours of separation. She went up there one day to visit, her children desperate to meet a pony that was smaller than them. Little people petting little animals. It was cute.  A few miles away from the farm was the house they used to live in many years ago. She had wanted to visit it, steeped as it was in the yearning of when the kids were tiny, and they first moved to the countryside. Chasing the warm embrace of a memory can be a slippery beast, though.  It isn’t one thing that is responsible for them, rather it is the sum of all that we sensed, an edited reel, leaving us with an overall feeling of a place and time. Some say it is never a good idea to return to the crime scene; nostalgia and reflection are not known to be reliable filing systems, and things are never quite as we remember them. But with rare, limitless time and blue skies in front of them that day, she soon found herself winding around old, familiar roads in search of a memory nearly a decade old. She should have realized as soon as she turned onto the road that this wasn’t going to go as planned. Muscle memory had her gasping in awe again, at the great green cathedral of trees they drove under, but it felt forced.  It was still beautiful, but it was really just that, a beautiful road. The Disney music and school runs, layers and layers of ordinary moments that added up to be this memory, were not there to laugh along beside her with what she now saw. The familiar bends, the house on the right where the old lady sat alone at the window, passing her every day on the way to school and back again, always alone until one day she was no longer there, her kids grown, packing up her house. She remembers the thought of perhaps visiting her and the regret that she did not. Past the apple orchard that in fall had sunflowers as big as giants tucked into its corner by the road, ignoring them as they drove past.  The familiar sway of the car, their bodies knowing that home was just around the next curve.  But it wasn’t home, it was a house. A house with a garden that wasn’t theirs.  Filled with objects and a life that had nothing to do with the shrieks and yells of plump little bodies that had run around it.  It was a stranger to them. They raced away, a panicked 3-point turn, along a road that once held them, back into the embrace of their warm, familiar present now on different roads. Their bronze grown green.