May 21, 2017

• Stepping Into the Past

  A lot of the fun of geocaching is the cool places it takes you. We've discovered nature preserves, hiking trails, bike trails and parks in our own area that we must have driven past for nearly 20 years without noticing. It took geocaching to bring them to our attention. My favorites, though, are the caches that take me to historic places. I've shared photos in the two previous posts of cemeteries and jails, a natural well, a one-room schoolhouse, and other places rich in history. My friend Maxine and her husband planned the trip Maxine and I took; as I mentioned before, her husband ended up not being able to go and I took his place. This made it all the more special that their plans called for a night spent in a place where the history is personal to me.

  Emporia, Kansas is where my dad grew up and some of his siblings were born. I spent many a summer vacation visiting Grandma and Grandpa and my Uncle Kevin, only four years older than me, in Emporia. They lived right in town, on Market Street. My great-grandparents lived just outside of town on Logan Ave., and Aunt Pat and Uncle Lou had a farm a few miles down the road in Olpe. I hadn't been back to Emporia since Aunt Pat's funeral about twelve years ago. I contacted Kevin (my siblings and I never called him "Uncle" because my older sister is older than him and she forbade it) and we picked him up at his house and drove to the cemetery a few blocks away to do some geocaching and pay our respects at Grandma and Grandpa's graves.

  First we did the geocaching. One of the caches was a multi-cache. We started out with the coordinates on the cache page, which took us to the grave of William Allen White and his daughter Mary. We were to get some numbers off of Mary White's headstone, do some math and end up with the coordinates for the next stage. Unfortunately, I was too hasty in finding the headstone and didn't realize that Mary was named for her grandmother, Mary A. White, and it was the elder Mary's headstone we were supposed to use. We eventually figured it all out. One of the headstones we found in the course of our wandering through the cemetery was for a WWI veteran and had a small doughboy figure on top, complete with lance. I wonder how many of those are still intact on headstones; that's the first one I've seen.

  

  After we found the caches, Kevin led us to his parents' (my grandparents') graves. I hadn't visited their graves since my grandmother's funeral in 1999.

  

  Kevin then began pointing out the other, identical headstones all the way down the row saying, "You can tell a traveling salesman went through our neighborhood. That one was our next-door neighbor, that one lived around the corner, that one was at the end of the street..." etc. We dropped Kevin at his house and went to the hotel to check in and so I could take a shower and change clothes because I'd been sweating like a pig that day. We then drove back to Kevin's house to pick him up and he directed us to Grandma and Grandpa's old house on Market Street.

  

  The gray house was theirs. It made me so happy that there was a train at the crossing down the block. Whenever we visited Grandma and Grandpa, as soon as the train signal started clanging, we'd run out the front door - usually barefoot - and down the narrow sidewalk to watch the train go past.

  The other thing that made me happy was that the people who own the house now have kept Grandma's iris bed intact. You can see it in the photo above, but here's a closeup.

  

  I won't pretend it wasn't emotional for me to stand in front of my grandparents' house, next to the irises my grandmother planted, and watch a train go by at the crossing. So much nostalgia!

  Kevin then took us to a BBQ joint owned by a school friend of his and we enjoyed a delicious dinner before saying goodbye, as we had to get an early start the next day and Kevin was leaving with some of my cousins on a motorcycle trip to Alabama for a crawfish festival.

  

  Poor Maxine got treated to lots of reminiscing about people she didn't know. I even learned a new story about Kevin... his wild ride through life started much younger than I knew!

  It was a special treat for me to spend a few hours back in a town that was an important part of my childhood, and to have the opportunity to spend some time with my youngest uncle.

   

  • 11:35 pm
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