you can't go home again

Yep, I finally understand the saying... Like, just the other day, I stupidly realized that this mansion-type house that was on the highway between my parents' street and the nearest intersection was gone, presumably torn down to make way for the 400,000 houses they are building there to support the population boom after Katrina... and that those shack type houses that used to be right before my parents' street, where a lunch lady from my elementary school lived (she used to burn the grass by her ditch so she didn't have to cut it), those shacks are gone as well, I guess. I can't picture them from when I pass by there now, but maybe I'm wrong. Regardless, it blew my mind when I realized that the picture in my mind, even of that little strip of land in smalltown USA, is not remotely similar to the present reality. Weird.

From High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver:

"My Grandfather Henry I remember in his sleeveless undershirt, home after a day's hard work on the farm at Fox Creek. His hide is tough and burnished wherever it has met the world—hands, face, forearms—but vulnerably white at the shoulders and throat. He is snapping his false teeth in and out of place, to provoke his grandchildren to hysterics.

As far as I know, no such snapshots exist in the authentic world. The citizens of my hometown ripped down the old school and quickly put to rest its picturesque decay. My grandfather always cemented his teeth in his head, and put on good clothes, before submitting himself to photography. Who wouldn't? When a camera takes aim at my daughter, I reach out and scrape the peanut butter off her chin. 'I can't help it,' I tell her. 'It's one of those mother things.' ... when I was growing up [in my hometown], I yearned for the slick and the new...

Homely charm is a relative matter. Now that I live in a western city... I think back fondly on my hometown. But the people who live there now might rather smile about the quaintness of a smaller town... I can never go home again, as long as I live, I reasoned... I've photographed my hometown in its undershirt."