As you get older, as the days of your life dwindle down, as you reflect on everything you know and the magnitude of all you don’t know and will never know, it’s easy to become nostalgic about the past. Today always seems more complicated than yesterday. We want to look back on a simpler time, without regard for the hardships of that time or the luxuries of this one.
I am in my 70s, with a personal history and an understanding of the world that make me feel quite justified in looking back into a past of simpler times as a welcome diversion.
I am not totally unproductive. I have writing projects, hopefully important writing projects, that I have every intention of working on for as long as I can. But I am mostly a vessel of memories. Some of my memories are quite worth reflecting upon. I am also a creature of creativity, with a thinking, inquisitive mind, prone to fanciful thoughts about things that could happen and things that might have happened in the past.
And I am a photographer. Today’s photo is a catalyst for fanciful thoughts. It is, in fact, the result of stitching together 10 to 15 bits of photos, all that were focused on the foreground bench in such a way to make everything else out of focus. I was trying to create how my mind felt all those times when I sat on that bench in front of that beautiful old bridge and imagined what it was like in the years after it was built in 1909.
At that time, the area was mostly farmland and forest. When the bridge and the road were built, it turned many long hours of travel through the woods and on trails into a much quicker and easier journey.
Sitting on that bench, eyes open, but totally unfocused, I imagined farmers in horse-drawn work wagons bringing their wheat and corn to the gristmill, parts of its foundation still a few feet down the creek below the bridge. I can imagine folks walking or riding horses or riding in carriages on the way to church or on the way to visit with neighbors.
I can even imagine a Ford Model T, the car that made car travel available to middle-class Americans and was produced around that time. I can almost see it driving across that bridge, the proud owner stopping in the middle and blowing his horn to hear the echo.
I can imagine all the sweethearts who snuck on that bridge to carve their names on the wooden walls; some of those carvings, though painted over, still exist, still remembered by local folks and by spirits of those who have long-since gone to their reward.
Many times I have sat there on that bench in front of that old red bridge. And hopefully, I will sit there again in the future. When that day comes, if it does, I will turn my unfocused eyes toward that old red bridge, let loose my thoughts, slip out of the bonds of reality, escape the frets and frustrations that fill too many of my present days, and, once again, I will lightly float through my endearing imagined moments of days gone by.