When one is young, they think everyone aged from age 30 and ancient from age 40. We think the popular will always be popular and we think the powerful will always hold their place.
I remember the wealthy I knew just a few years ago, and how no one even knows their names. I think of homes I used to know, which have been dozed to the ground.
I reflect upon old homesteads in all the people put into them in work for dreams which came true in simpler forms, and how it is a time now that large Monsanto disks till to the edge of sagging barns and many times all that is left is a clump of trees which was a family home.
People always think they are immortal and the world will stop if they were not upon this earthen sphere, and yet, the greatest of monuments from pyramids, no one can say who they honored and the greatest of shrines are but rubble or jungle grown from Greece to Mexico.
Rome was not built in a day, but it is true that the heap of ruins go on forever.
When a home where George Washington was born, has become nothing but a memorial of flowers which were tended and now gone wild, it is a great deal like Whitman's Grass poem concerning Abraham Lincoln, in once the grass covers the earth grave, it is a time when the emotions have healed and the mind begins to forget the person who was.
No monuments, hordes of money, great victories withstand the sediments of the human mind as they continue to bury those who they build their lives upon.
Caesar took no gold nor empire with him, and what chicken now scratches upon the home he was birthed.
A VISIT TO WASHINGTON'S BIRTHPLACE
White House, April 30, 1906.
DEAR KERMIT:
On Saturday afternoon Mother and I started off on the _Sylph_, Mother
having made up her mind I needed thirty-six hours' rest, and we had a
delightful time together, and she was just as cunning as she could be.
On Sunday Mother and I spent about four hours ashore, taking our lunch
and walking up to the monument which marks where the house stood in
which Washington was born. It is a simple shaft. Every vestige of the
house is destroyed, but a curious and rather pathetic thing is that,
although it must be a hundred years since the place was deserted, there
are still multitudes of flowers which must have come from those in the
old garden. There are iris and narcissus and a little blue flower, with
a neat, prim, clean smell that makes one feel as if it ought to be
put with lavender into chests of fresh old linen. The narcissus in
particular was growing around everywhere, together with real wild
flowers like the painted columbine and star of Bethlehem. It was a
lovely spot on a headland overlooking a broad inlet from the Potomac.
There was also the old graveyard or grave plot in which were the
gravestones of Washington's father and mother and grandmother, all
pretty nearly ruined. It was lovely warm weather and Mother and I
enjoyed our walk through the funny lonely old country. Mocking-birds,
meadow-larks, Carolina wrens, cardinals, and field sparrows were singing
cheerfully. We came up the river in time to get home last evening. This
morning Mother and I walked around the White House grounds as usual. I
think I get more fond of flowers every year. The grounds are now at that
high stage of beauty in which they will stay for the next two months.
The buckeyes are in bloom, the pink dogwood, and the fragrant lilacs,
which are almost the loveliest of the bushes; and then the flowers,
including the lily-of-the-valley.
Houses like memories of the dead are destroyed either by time or new occupants looking to make their own bigger mark which only too soon will be forgotten in time.
Lame Cherry
agtG
