This. Just This. Milestones and Memories in the Journey. This.

It is not the location I remember, yet it is. The infrastructure is there (sort of) and the landscape looks the same. The color is close, too, but a little more red than maroon than it used to be. Yet the sky...the sky and water, this is the same. This is the memory.

Mom, Chitunga and I took a one-day road trip to Hamilton, Sherburne, and Lebanon Reservoir yesterday to visit locations where my mom and dad grew up (and where my grandparents are buried).

But this was camp. This was our Saturday and Sunday get away: the fishing, the diving board, the walks to the candy store, the flies, the thunderstorms, the fireworks, the dam cars, the fire pit, the neighbors, the water-skier bets, the Pitch tournaments, the two channels that the antennae was able to grab, the allergies and inability to breathe, and the bathing stars that came every morning after a night of twinkling in the skies.

Loch Lebanon.

It's still there. It's just that it isn't. "I see the trees, and the trees see me."

The hardest part of the whole day was standing at the gravesite, however. As mom said, "They're not here, and I never felt they were." Still, it's where their namesakes are buried and, for me, it is a location of centrality. It is a reentering of the universe.

24 Milford Street, too. Such a core. Such a beautiful foundation and center.

And eating at Ozzie's in Sherburne. Okay. It was a great day - one that can only come with the power it had once or twice in a lifetime.

So thankful. So thankful, indeed.