I’m back in Paraguay, the land of my childhood. I first came here as a baby many years ago, when my parents founded a leprosy station that I called home.
Alone, I make my way along a dirt road toward our house, a red and white brick L-shaped structure, with a veranda running along two sides. It was set back in the woods, maybe 100 meters from the other houses on the station.
But it’s not my family’s house I’m looking for.
To get from our house to the other cluster of houses on the station, we used to walk on this road through a dense east-Paraguay forest of cedro, lapacho, ibyraró, and palo rosa.
By the age of 10, I’d spent many hours in that forest. I ripped out a narrow path with a machete as deeply as I could into the woods. It wound around trees that provided a good barrier against the prying eyes of possible intruders. At the end of the path, I cleared an area for my own little home. Pieces of lumber, crudely hammered together, became my table and chairs. Empty rice sacks, neatly lined up on the ground, served as my bed. In the center of my kitchen, I built a stove by placing several old bricks on top of one another to surround a small area that held my fire.
When I was finished, I had a fine home of my own. Our family’s house was often cluttered and dusty. Everything in my forest home was neat and orderly.
No one was ever really at home in my family’s house. Most of the time it was an empty shell. As medical missionaries, my parents were much too busy tending to their leprosy patients to be hanging around the house. Within the walls of my own little home, marked by a precise circle of stones around the perimeter, the big empty hole inside of me got all filled up.
For hours at a time, I lay on my rice-sack bed or sat on my makeshift chairs and felt the warmth of my home wrap itself around me.
I stop and stare. The trees are gone.
The area has been completely cleared. An occasional stubble or root mars the otherwise barren field spread out in front of me. I walk in the general direction of my winding path, but it’s hard to know exactly where it might have been.
And then I spot them. Some are partially buried beneath the ground. Others are scattered. But I can just make out the circle of stones.
I also have a “circle of stones.” In my case they’re actually large boulders protruding up through 50 yards of whitewater in the Rondout Creek downstream from Rosendale, NY. For countless hours I learned to fish, do upstream ferries, and downstream peel offs in my childhood rowboat providing the initial foundation of skill and fantasy that has supported a lifetime of whitewater fishing and boating.
While it has been years since I was on that stream, I often go back to this place of early comfort, if only in my mind. Do others of you have similar places from your early years that you still go to today?
Marlena says “the trees are gone.” My own attempts to return to the past frequently fail to meet expectations in similar ways. Either the physical world has truly changed as in Marlena’s case or frequently my expectations based upon the memories of youth are inconsistent with the world as it now appears to be. For example, the ceilings in my childhood home are much lower than I remember, the stairs are small, and my childhood bedroom must’ve shrunk over the years.