Walking some familiar, old roads
Dean Poling
Old roads.
The old roads of my childhood haven’t changed much. This became apparent during recent walks through neighborhoods of my old hometown.
Some places are vastly different than they were 40 years ago. Vast tracts of woodlands are now commercialized shopping centers. My old high school disappeared a couple of decades ago, replaced by a downtown business.
But the neighborhood — the places where I ran and walked, waited on school buses and rode bikes, where I learned to drive and flew kites, climbed hills and drove go-carts — those old roads haven’t changed much at all.
Some of the people living in them are different but the houses remain the same. There is the same silhouette of hillsides and rooftops now that I’m in my 50s as there was when I was in elementary school.
The fields and hills look the same in sunrise and sunset now as they did then. The sun cannot tell time based on the sites of the neighborhood. The sun wouldn’t know the difference between 1982 and 2022 shining on these old roads.
The roads still have the same curves, the same texture, the same grooves. They feel the same underfoot. They provide the same breath-taking views. They cause the same breath-stealing exertion as some roads climb higher and higher.
That has changed.
The roads remain angled at the same degree. They have not become more steep. Yet, it is more of a struggle to walk up the same roads where once I ran, where once I pedaled a bike, up and up and over again. Now, I feel the road in my legs, in the tightening of my back, in the sweat trickling from my scalp, in the breath squeezing my lungs, in and out, up and up and down.
The roads are not old. The roads are timeless. I’m the one who is old.
These roads that I know like the back of my hand. They look the same as they did 40 years ago. Yet, it is the back of my hand that no longer looks familiar. My younger self would not recognize this hand before me.
I am the one changing.
The one threatened with vanishing.
The roads will still be here when I’m but a memory on their paths.
Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.
