Don't Let Gone be Forgotten

 

I mentioned last weekend that I would be traveling for the next few days. A journey to northern California's wine country, setting of a conference my husband would be attending, somehow reminded me of the importance of keeping track of the details of our own history. Sometimes, that history can be a visible, and daily, reminder of our past. Other times, it can be gone—and soon after, forgotten.

There in beautiful Santa Rosa, I couldn't help but remember one significant building which, in an instant, was gone. The building was a red-painted round barn, built in 1899 as part of the winery established by the Fountaingrove community.

On a trip to Santa Rosa in the fall of 2015, my husband and I had stayed at a hotel situated right in front of the historic building. I was clueless about what lay behind us until we checked into our second story room and opened the drapes to take in the view. There it was, up on the hill behind us: a sixteen-sided piece of local history.

Two years later, it was gone, taken out by the devastating Tubbs Fire.

It has been almost exactly nine years since that loss, not just of one historic building, but of tens of thousands of acres of homes, farms, stores, medical centers, school campuses, and other community gathering places. When those buildings are gone and the years pass, for all except those directly impacted, we tend to forget what once, but for the inferno, had been there.

That becomes a reminder to me of all the visible signs of our family history. As I wrote after the loss, "Some things just aren't there anymore." The homes where we visited our grandparents, the school where an aunt or uncle attended, the store where Dad got his first job as a teenager: all these tangible signs of our family's past ultimately disappear from the scenery. Sometimes, when we return on that nostalgic trip to see things as we remembered them, even the roads have changed so much that we can no longer find our way.

It's only when we write down these details to preserve them—or sketch out the place as it once was, or label the photographs before we forget the names our grandparents told us—that we can keep that history fresh in our minds. Better yet, so we can pass those ephemeral details on to the next generation when it is their turn to keep the memories alive.

Above: Fountaingrove Round Barn, November 2015; photograph courtesy of Chris Stevens.