The Book of the City of Ghost Cats

Part of leaving is getting my visa approved, packing my bags, getting a one-way ticket and getting myself on the plane. But another part of moving from the U.S., one I am becoming practiced in, is the extended goodbye.

As many of you might know who read this and were there, was a gathering tonight. I take care with these posts not to provide the Internet-at-large with excessive details of my actual life, but we were gathered to honor a brilliant lady. A gardener. A friend. Who is much missed. It was an opportunity to walk along the creek, to take a couple photos. And to remember the singular series of events that put me exactly so: waving farewell to home and roots in somewhere of the middle of my life.

Golden is home, by spirit, if not by address anymore. It’s where my parents met and fell in love and got married. It’s where I grew up, under the watchful eyes of Lookout Mountain and the two Tables. It’s where I spent eight years – ten years ago – working on projects to encourage other people to love it, too.

It’s a complex feeling for me now. I’m two months away from it no longer being just down the road. Neither it nor I will disappear, but both of us will change. Truth be told, we have been changing over the past decade. For better and worse.

I know it’s always a subject of debate: when exactly were the Golden days? Pun quite intended. Is life now just post-lapsarian? Even back then, people would yearn for yesteryear. We’re all trying to get back to an Eden that no longer exists outside of our memories. One that’s been edited, filtered and cherry-picked to create a time when we had more energy, our loved ones were immortal and there was always plenty of parking.

Here and now is always going to be just a bit flat compared to a mythic past. We can’t help it. That’s the nature of time as well as love.

That said, I think Golden gives time a run for its money.
It is so special. Vibrant. A true community. History of the Old West under the Howdy Folks arch. You want to be there.

Inasmuch as I want to say goodbye to any one person, I want to say goodbye to Golden itself. It was a gentle place, a strange place, a fine place to begin in the world. I remember a moment in every intersection, every store as I knew them, now changed many times over.

I remember trying to figure out how to make horses move for a parade when they definitely did not want to move.
I remember Candlelight Walks at Christmas and my tradition of walking alone in the dark along that creek with my hot cider before coming along to chestnuts roasting and caroling and a bridge aglow with lights.
I remember finding a whole head of a hog, just smelling of formaldehyde, on the road by our house. I remember fireworks. Putting out pizzas for the School of Mines kids who paint the M on Lookout and put up the Christmas decorations each year. I remember seeing Barack Obama speak with my mother in Lions Park. I remember kind business owners. I remember mentors and sweet souls who always wished the best for me. I remember wild turkeys wandering down Washington Ave. I remember I remember our Sesquicentennial celebration and having more free cake than we could ever give away. There’s so much I remember. I remember being remembered.

I don’t know if York will ever feel like that, feel like mine beneath my feet. If I’ll always feel foreign to it, someone peering over a garden wall into a world where I am the stranger. These are the most nebulous worries I have as a soon-to-be expatriate. The type of things you can’t resolve with a checklist or a document. You just have to have faith that you’ll adjust, mainly because you always do.

But it’s a small enough town – less than 150,000 at last count – to not get too far lost. I get the Facebook groups, see posts from their tourism boards and their local updates. The stories and struggles are almost comically the same, only with, perhaps, a different accent.

Parking, costs of living, everyone looking for a service provider who won’t overcharge them. It’s the same struggles as you’d find in any town in America, no matter how special. There’s an odd comfort in that.

So I know we’ll have our own garden. A place for an elderberry bush for my mother, room for roses and chilies and daffodils. I think my friend would have loved to hear about it.

As a storm comes in, sings along to the summer surge of cars on the highway, I’m grateful to have reason to look back and look ahead.