children lay glowing by the ambient light of streetlamps.
The houses of Camden scrolled by slowly as we walked quietly to the main street and made our way to town. I would always look at the windows in hopes of catching a glimpse of the life within. I wondered who was awake and what the sleepers were dreaming. Sometimes there would be a chicken cackling from someone’s backyard as we crossed from the darkness into the lamps of the main street. From the darkness of her mind, my mother would lead me through the Camden of her youth. I could see the old warehouses along the main strip as well as the twin hotels and the town’s first furniture store. The buildings in her mind were brick and wooden with large hand-painted signs. She would tell me what used to be standing where, and who used to live or work there. I knew we were walking on two different sidewalks as she let her memory paint the old town back into place. We passed decaying houses hidden off the road on dilapidated, overgrown lots.
“I knew some of the people that used to live around here. They are gone now.” Though most of the layout of our towns was the same, a lot of what she knew to be her home was getting washed away by time and progress. We pressed on into the empty town where old store fronts were only painted into new store fronts. Here is where towns of our youth coincided: the historic district. We were traveling to the center of town to get to the post office; one of her favorite things to do.
I would stand watch as my mother dug in the post office waste bins for catalogs. The post office was old with brass adorning every part that wasn’t painted white. On the farthest wall there was a mural of hunters chasing a fox that was hidden in the brush below a jumping horse. On another wall was a mural of the end of a revolutionary battle in which Red Coats were surrendering as freedom fighters pulled their dead from the battlefield. My mother liked nostalgia catalogs filled with old fashioned radios and pictures of rosy cheeked people sitting at a well- dressed table. She liked catalogs of things she would never buy such as lawn mowers and sexy underwear, though I would later learn that I was wrong about the latter. After the pillaging, we would walk quietly home with arms full of catalogs and junk mail through the town my mother grew up in. I tried to picture the world through her eyes. We would pass old buildings and new ones as we stepped forward to home stopping only for penny candy and a newspaper at a gas station that had just opened for the day. It would still be dark and the stars only just start to fade as we stepped into the silent house where my siblings were still sleeping. My mother would follow me through the dark hallway and to my room. She would kiss me on the cheek and squeak the floor as she left, and I would crawl back into bed and wonder where people like “The Professor,” “Crazy Joe,” “Snake Lady,” and “Marlboro Man” slept and what the world was like through their eyes in the darkness of their memories.
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