Past Present

I felt it in the whisper of the wind through the ancient cypress towering above me, a portal that I’ve walked through as a toddler. A teen. A young woman. In every decade of my life, certainly. Inspiring in their resilience to weather, to change. An anchor to my past.

I felt it while navigating around DeLand, skirting the city to whisk along the St. Johns River basin. Five years ago we’d found this rural route while tracking down pieces of the Spring-to-Spring Trail to ride. It’s not so rural now. Swaths of forest, gone. Subdivisions blooming. A symbol of unrelenting change. The present.

I felt it in the purpose of our journey: reunion. When one of my favorite high school teachers reached out to ask if I was headed to the reunion, I hadn’t decided.

I have a fraught relationship with how I became a student at Forest High. I’d just finished freshman year in my hometown when Dad declared he was putting our house on the market. One of his closest friends had moved to Ocala and we were going to as well.

I was in shock. The friendships I had were rooted in my sense of place. My sense of time. An introvert, I didn’t run with crowds. The people I was closest to I’d known for much of my life. Time spent around a studious Eagle Scout had blossomed, after two years, into him asking me out to the movies. A chaperoned date, with his mother present, to see Murder by Death.

My mother refused to let me go.

I’d thought that slap in the face sprung from the close-minded religion they’d adopted. My sweetheart was Catholic. I was, at this point in my teens, disgusted with the hypocrisy of a religion focused on converting people to your belief system rather than respecting theirs.

In retrospect, Mom likely knew what Dad intended and was trying to protect me from even more pain of parting. Decades later, speaking to her frankly about the radical move we’d made that made no sense to me—from a quiet rural valley in the Appalachian mountains to a place we vacationed year after year—she’d been just as distressed. A housewife, she’d been given no choice. No voice. Her roots ran generations deep up the Hudson Valley; what few of her relatives remained were scattered between us and the Hudson River. And in fact, if not for a relative of Mom’s leaving her the funds to buy it, we wouldn’t have had that nice little house that Dad now wanted to sell. Utterly out of our control, both our lives were upended.

I was an oldest child. A quiet child. A writer. My earnest attempts at storytelling (complete with hand-drawn illustrations) earned me a space in the elementary school library. A rejection letter from Random House at age eight: Mom had submitted them a story I’d written to entertain my sister. Recognition in junior high, including an article in the local paper. Of four awards I’d just received at the close of my freshman year, one was for writing.

The house didn’t sell by the time sophomore year rolled around. Instead, I had to agonize through one final month with my friends, painfully aware I’d soon lose them all. The hardest part was sharing a class with my erstwhile boyfriend, knowing I’d probably never see him again. (Spoiler: I never have, but in meeting John, I wasn’t surprised he was an Eagle Scout too).

When we moved to Ocala, I landed at Forest High School. The classes I’d been taking in New Jersey didn’t entirely map to what they offered sophomores. I found myself in two classes entirely populated with seniors. Teased over my lack of a southern accent, I found it necessary to adopt one. I wrote letters to my old friends up north, including the one I’d never had a chance to date.

Those threads broke, as they do. New relationships took their place. I spent a great deal of time in the library at Forest High, absorbing books, for I was still not permitted to join the after-school activities and service clubs that so many of the attendees of our reunion this weekend were a part of. That religion thing, again. Yet Mom didn’t argue with me joining the newspaper staff and yearbook staff, since they were outlets for my writing. In the end, they broadened who I came to know during my last two years of high school. After we graduated, our little group scattered to the four winds and didn’t keep in touch.

Facebook notwithstanding, I walked into the reunion not recognizing anyone. I was a bit embarrassed to be greeted immediately by people who recognized me. Name tags with our graduation photos helped. As I caught on to who was who, and which people gravitated to one another, I heard one exclaim they’d known another since the second grade. I felt that loss again. Because of the timing of our move in my life, I neither retained those deep relationships from my hometown nor built them anew with my new peers. I still felt an outsider.

I’d come to this gathering because of Pat. Besides being one of the few teachers who’d made me feel welcome as a stranger in a strange land, she’s been a cheerleader of my career as an author. When John and I got married, she was one of a handful of people from my distant past I’d invited to our wedding. While she and I talked, I tried to recount other teacher’s names in my mind. Only four others from Forest High bubbled to the surface. They’d left enough impact to resonate across the decades.

The next day, John and I met up with my siblings and some of their kids for lunch. The venue, which my sister suggested, is a delight: the historic train depot in Ocala. It, too, surfaced memories before they’d even arrived. Seeing my best friend off on Amtrak—except Amtrak didn’t stop here anymore, a bus picked her up to take her to the nearest station south, Lakeland—after my Dad died. The many times we’d been to this restaurant when it was called Dee Dee’s Dog House. It’s now The Depot on Magnolia. The welcoming artsy steampunk vibe was eclipsed by the fabulous food.

At the table, a gap of fifty years divided me and the youngest family member. Fifty years! Like he is now, I was just on the cusp of becoming a teen back then. How much has unfolded in those five decades! How much has radically changed: not just in my life, but in our culture, our technology, the world.

Yet at Silver Springs, the cypresses still stand as mute sentinels to the immutable nature of nature left to its own devices. And thanks to those who care about history and preservation, the former attraction, now a state park, persists. Its glass bottomed boats still glide by

Time marches on. But some things never change.