mayberry is dead

For much of my childhood, I lived in a tiny town in southern Indiana with a population of about five hundred, and a pretty big number of those people were my cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I tell people that, for all intents and purposes, I grew up in Mayberry.  We had no sheriff or jail cell, but like the tv town, at some point we had a barber shop, a post office, a small restaurant, a grocery store, a high school, and a Fourth of July parade. Everyone knew whose kid you were and whether or not you should be doing what you were currently doing.  (You were not.)  It was a community of families who went to church and school together, kept their yards nice and their houses painted, planted flowers and put them on the graves of the rest of family in the cemetery down the road.  Kids could stray off on their bikes and come home to their mothers' calls, each of the calls unique and shrill enough to carry to the edges of our allowable world.

This past weekend, I visited my Mayberry to help clean out my aunt Anna's things from the tiny house she shared with her husband of 71 years.  My almost 90 year old uncle John still lives there, but my aunt, my mother's last remaining sibling, passed away last week at 87.  I loved my aunt and had many wonderful memories of her.  She had had some level of dementia for many years, which did not ingratiate her with some of her family and which manifested as hoarding, among other things.  Thus the clean out.  There were things hoarded which should never be hoarded, and especially should not be left to others to clean out.  There were other things that were like tiny miracle packages from the past.  For instance, a yellowed envelope, labeled in my grandmother's handwriting, containing the baby curls of my beloved grandpa Taylor.  He was born in 1903, I think. There they were, still perfect, blondish red, soft as any baby hair. I only knew my grandpa as completely bald--he was nearly 60 when I was born--so it was nothing short of amazing to see these curls, to imagine him as a curly-headed toddler and young man.  There can be a few odd treasures in the mountain of a hoarder's hoard.

The overwhelming emotion of the day was sadness. Not at my aunt's passing so much--she had been suffering and it was not unexpected, and though our beliefs may differ on this point or that, we all believe she is in a better place--but at the state of Mayberry itself. What a sad, downtrodden place.  It has become a place for people to live who can't afford to live in any of the nearby towns where there are jobs.  Which basically means people who can barely afford to live at all, because the nearby towns are not metropolises with great jobs. Along with the poverty is an element of opioid addiction, which is rampant in southern Indiana.  Much of my little town is ramshackle, torn down, fallen down, uncared for, rusting.  The Mayberry of my youth, with its odd mix of severe limitations and golden childhood freedoms, its church picnics and homemade ice cream, its gardens of green beans and zinnias, its wiffleball games and hide-n-seek and penny candy, felt dead. I could never have stayed there, and I don't want to go back in time, but it does make me nostalgic and sad. (Photo: the house I lived in from 1961 to 1965. Next door to my grandparents.  It had paint then, but was an old house even then.  It is still occupied.)