Leaving it to the next generation....

Snooping about, looking for interesting things to share with y'all, I came across this pic. At first it was just one of the pics that is interesting, but no big deal. It was only later that I realized my mind continued to return again and again to this image.

Why? It's just a ramshackle old thing, falling apart and going to rot. But, if you look closer, you can see pretty pink curtains, comfortable wicker chairs, and even what looks like a welcoming wreath. There are the remnants of planted flowers, a lawn of grass, and what looks to be the chimney of a stove. Point; at one time this was a place where people lived....at least for a short time. Here there was love, laughter, and in my mind I see an old couple looking out through the last days in this little haven they built.

And, ironic and oddly seperate, yet seems so attached in my mind is an image, again, that I can't shake. I took my dog for a walk down paths I wore into the land as a child. This was the woods, the ravine through which flowed the crick. No, not the creek, the crick. And, this was the place we kids would run and whoop and play all day, returning at the end of the day with burrs in our hair and mud in our ears. This was where I first went skinny-dipping....it was an actual swimming hole, if that isn't straight out of Mayberry RFD. I spent so much of my childhood down there, but things had changed.

The trails were faded, existing more as a lost road in my memory than an actual path anymore. I followed the faded paths, and my puppy walked them with me as my dog did when I was 10. Now there were "No Trespassing" signs....how ironic that the very sign which trespasses upon my memories tells me I'm about to trespass upon the very center of my childhood. There were no children playing "war" in the woods, no screams of play coming from the crick. It was like walking into a ghost town; the structures of my memories were still in place, but the life was gone.

Sadly, I turned around and left through the very overgrown trail I used to enter this area I once loved. I guess I couldn't understand why kids no longer played down there. The silence was deafening and heartbreaking.

I don't know where kids play in this area now. Don't really care. Somehow we failed to leave this area to the new generation. Perhaps if there was a place to plug in the X-Box? Somehow it became illegal to even be there. Somehow it probably became considered "dangerous". Whatever happened, the memories stop with my generation. The pretty pink curtains and lawn chairs are no longer in the sight picture

National debt. Afganistan. Iraq. The Gulf of Mexico. The Beaches of Pensicola...... What do we leave our children? Will my generation be the last to remember the Gulf? What moments of love and childhood will disappear next?