plus ça change…

Willard Brook State Park

There are few times when you go back and everything is exactly the same.

Visit your old grade school, and the teachers are no longer (as) scary, the water fountains are way too low, and forget using the toilets. Even the walls are a more cheerful color.

This flux is so consistent that it is almost jarring when you go back and everything is identical. You expect Twilight Zone music. I took my daughter to Willard Brook today, a place to which we had gone  frequently ever since her oldest sister (now 24) was about 5. We haven’t been for the past few years, and Jenny didn’t remember it from its description.

We pulled in and I could almost feel the wheels turning in Jenny’s head. “I’m remembering one thing after another,” she said- the place was that unchanged. Same beach, same buoys stretched from a tree on one side to a tree on the other, same stand of cattails. The same babies are dragging a bucket of wet sand, Pullups peeping out the top of their swim tanks, crying when they tip over from the strain; same 4 mothers over on the rocks sharing smokes- not kidding- as if they had been supplied by a central casting somewhere, or kicked off the set of The Truman Show. Coolers, beach balls, Frisbies, ice cream truck…

It was absolutely jarring. Especially since I am acclimated to hunt for change in the online landscape, stasis in the physical one was a little unnerving.

But it is really pretty here. I can smell the charcoal fires that people are using to grill their hamburgers and hotdogs, and likely marshmallows for s’mores.  Worth the time it took to come here, and the $5 per car charge has not increased since we used to come a long time ago.

S’more side note: You can tell a lot about a person by the way they toast their marshmallows. In my family, the perfectionist toasted hers slowly and carefully, to the point of being able to describe it as “golden brown.” The one who had a few challenges with the old fine motor coordination skills always had hers drop off into the coals. Then there was my ADHD poster child. He always started off really well, got distracted, and the next thing you know had this huge ball of dripping fire at the end of the stick. I was always kept busy toasting replacement marshmallows and salving egos.

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