Ties That Bind

 

Ties That Bind

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Among the ties that bind, one of the strongest threads, I believe, is the place we call home.

When my family moved from the rolling hills of Ohio River country in Indiana to Harlem, Montana, I felt like my roots had been wrenched out of the earth and planted loosely in a foreign country.  My first day in school was my eleventh birthday and I had nothing to celebrate.

We gather experiences along the way, don’t we, and in later years, when I needed or wanted to come home, Harlem was my home. I had come to deeply love the people and the country. Home was where Dad lived. Home was the place that formed experiences that made me who I am today.

I’m fortunate to have experienced many places as Home. I feel as At Home here in Mexico as any place I’ve lived. It’s simply a different chapter in my Life Book. Yet, the deepest Home in my heart is still Harlem.

Events these last several days have left me feeling quite unsettled. The fire that destroyed the two historic buildings on Main Street rattled me. When I learned the fires were  deliberate, that news made it more heartbreaking, to me.

In a way, the fire felt personal. The buildings were empty, abandoned, sad monuments to our past. You want to know what still lived in those blackened ruins? Our memories.

The movies we saw. Our favorite seats. The people we sat alongside, watching those films, laughing or crying or clutching their hands in terror as the gorilla climbed the Empire State Building. Oh, wait, that one was laughter.

Being female, some of my memories of Don’s Pharmacy are more terrifying than any movie. Back in the old days, we had to go to Frank, our faces red with misplaced shame, to ask for personal products wrapped in brown paper, tucked behind the back counter. Over the years I learned that Frank always acted with kindness and never with judgment.

Buildings aren’t what make a town. People make the community. History. Buildings and people come and go, changeable. More history. Following the fire, it is even more heartbreaking to have a hostage situation in town, to know that people died and people were injured.

The person who set the fire, the man who held a woman hostage, the woman who tragically died, those people who were injured, all are human beings, each with a story we may never know, but, each person, every human being, leave an impression, that becomes a part of our town, that affects us, whether we are in town or far away. Each story is important and should not be dismissed; that is my belief.

Eight of us ‘girls’ who graduated from Harlem High in ’63, have formed an email group and are in touch every few days. Some of us were discussing the recent tragic events when one of us dismissed my concern with the words that, “It is no longer our home. It is no longer our world.”

Those words made me feel even more sad, though I know parts of my friend’s story and why she feels that way. I disagree.

The home ties to our town, the school, the friends, those neighbors we knew or knew their names, the streets we walked to the Confectionary for a hamburger and milk shake at noon, the library, which burned soon after we graduated, as did our newspaper office later, the grocery stores and hardware stores, the churches, the gumbo roads, the Milk River, the old grain elevator, the trains rumbling through town, the bank where I had my first account, all create threads of memory, ties that bind us home. Most of all, the people. All are pieces of our world that made us who we are today.

I’m lucky. In later years, I came home and created new memories. I explored the countryside, most especially Hill, Blaine and Phillips County backroads, found sheer beauty that I never knew existed, met newcomers and got to know old timers, all in my town that was a shell of its former self, with an already gutted Main Street, a town with less that half the population of that when I was in high school. Harlem is still my hometown.

Sondra Ashton

Looking out my back door

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