The past lives on in a rural assisted living center, much like elders.
Unless you have reason to visit, both remain invisible - a country you’ll never see.
Yes, I know. Too much to do as you hurtle through the years. I don’t recall all this invisibility when I was young.
“Seems to me” as the old folks were wont to say, grandparents, aged parents, and aunts lived with family members once upon a time.
I recall how great it was to sit at their knee and hear tales. New worlds opened up when they spoke. Not so today.
These days older folks do a lot of sitting. A lot. TV tries to entertain them but fails.
Seems to me, that a lot of old things sit and sit along lesser roads. Lesser meaning not many people travel them.
Back roads are grand avenues, places where the past still lives. Such is the case with a lonely road I took through western South Carolina almost to the Georgia border.
I could see Georgia from South Carolina across a great expanse of water once known as the Savannah River. Yes, we even put rivers in rest homes. Dammed they are and damned, too.
My guide into the past was SC Highway 23. It runs through the Sumter National Forest west to Highway 28. At an old store called Bracknell’s, you can cross the rail tracks and make your way down to Clarks Hill Lake.
At that road’s terminus, 2 states stare across the lake I skied upon in my youth. 
I never got to see the river run free through my homeland. Born too late.
I ended up at the impoundment about dark, but on the way in I saw the past.
I stopped at a cemetery where a mausoleum like my parents’ sits. A preacher and his wife rest there.
Just behind their mausoleum stands the marker of a girl who died at age 5. Just 5.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
On I traveled. Near the lake, I spotted an old fire truck from 1946, I’m told. How many fires did this old truck snuff out? Where are the men who manned it? Where are the heroes?
Then I caught the lake at sundown, when a dying sun fans out its colors, and the light turns sweet. Beneath all that sweet sun-colored water runs the ghost of the mighty Savannah.
For a minute I tried to picture the river running free, but I just couldn’t.
Something about the back roads proves therapeutic. Something about the back roads energizes me.
I’ll never tire of this vast assisted living center where the past sits and sits waiting for a visit from others.
It makes me think about beauty, lives cut short, forgotten heroes, how things once were. As much as anything, it’s calling my name. I, too, will one day become a back road sight in a cemetery along a lesser road called Highway 220.
When I do, I hope some future journalist-writer will ramble, and like that bear that went over the mountain, see what he can see and tell his busy brethren just all they’re missing.