By JD Dotson
IT’S AMAZING WHAT YOU FORGET ABOUT HOME — UNTIL YOU GO BACK.
Last issue, I explored New Albany, where I co-own a business with my sister and fiancé. This time, I headed to Lanesville, where I grew up. There, I climbed the slide in a park I used to love as a child and was flooded with memories more than 30 years old. I also realized getting up and down the chain ladder used to be a lot easier way back then. The park behind my childhood home hasn’t changed much, though it could use a bit of TLC and seems to have been neglected over the years. Long ago, the creek was the site of many imaginary battles, hikes, crawdad and minnow catching, and fall was welcomed with the Heritage Weekend, which always took forever to get here and went by so quickly. I visited my mom in the same house I grew up in, and stopped by the cemetery where my father is buried. I climbed the jungle gym at the church playground, the same one from my childhood, and took in the quiet on top of the big hill.
Lanesville still has no stoplight, looks very much the same, has remained quiet and sleepy but has a pretty great winery, a library and a really good school. It was a great little town to grow up in. I appreciate it so much more now, in retrospect and through the eye of my camera. Suddenly, everything I’d forgotten has become a memory I won’t let disappear again.
SPOT THE SCENE:
(Clockwise from top left)
n 1. Heritage Park farm machinery. n 2. St Mary’s playground. n 3. Bouncy rabbit at Gresham Memorial Park. n 4. Grove of trees off Hwy 62. n 5. View from walking covered bridge of the creek. n 6. Tunneled bumpy slide at Gresham Memorial Park. n 7. Turtle Run Winery.
n 8. Rainsplitter house. n 9. Old barn and tractor at Turtle Run Winery. n 10. Mail pouch barn. n 11. Lanesville water tower.
