I drove from Jenkinsburg to Locust Grove to Hampton last week. I didn’t have to go this way. It might have made more sense to go through Jackson to Griffin. But something inside me tugged on the steering wheel and turned me north on Hwy 42.

Marion asked me, “You want me to turn on the GPS, or you know where you’re going?”

The road to Hampton is etched in my memory. Every turn, every hill, every farm is drawn out on a map that runs through my head like a movie that I’ve seen a thousand times. I can see, feel, and hear the clunk of the bridge over the Towaliga, miles ahead, just as clearly as I can see the pavement right in front of me.

“I think I can make it without the GPS.”

There’s one problem. The general layout of the road is the same. The landscape around it has changed. The map inside my head, like the Rand McNally map under the seat of my truck, is old. What I see in my head is from 50 years ago. What I see out my window is barely recognizable.

There’s a lot of new business in Locust Grove. Modern shopping venues. Modern eateries. Big grocery stores. It takes me a while to recognize a few of the old brick store fronts. I wonder if any of the old shopkeepers still live around here. Maybe there’s a grandson who still has a key to the front door.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not speaking disparagingly of the changes. I’m just admitting that I need to update my map.

There’s a traffic light at the corner of 42 and Hampton Road. The old school building off to the left is still standing. I think about some of the kids I knew who sat in those rooms. They stood at the chalk board and worked out math problems. Some of them stayed after school and wrote one hundred times, “I will not talk in class.”

When I had to stay after at Hampton Elementary, I learned to write with two pencils. I could hold them together and make the words fit on two lines all in one pass.

I will not chew gum in class.
I will not chew gum in class.

One hundred times became fifty times in half the time. I didn’t invent it. But it worked and the teachers either didn’t catch us, or they didn’t mind.

It’s not Hampton Road anymore. On the other end it was known as Locust Grove Road. On this end, Hampton Road. When the Post Office finally assigned mailbox numbers, I lived at 1503 Hampton/Locust Grove Road. My dad would shorten it on his letters to H&LG Road. Too long to write it out.

Now it has a new name. I have no idea how new. It could have changed 30 years ago, and it would be new to me. The little green sign reads Bill Somebody Boulevard. Sounds more sophisticated.

I can tell you this much. I don’t recognize one blessed thing between here and the interstate. When I was in high school, about the only thing I remember is maybe one gas station that stood near the end of the southbound exit ramp. Otherwise, it was a few country houses and a lot of woods.

Beyond the interstate, heading west, the road begins to look more familiar. It’s changed, but not as dramatically. I can see familiar houses. Somewhere along here there used to be a skeet range. I worked there one short period loading the machines with clay targets, but I’ve lost exactly where it was.

“There’s a small cemetery right up here on the left,” I tell Marion.

I’m looking for it, hoping it’s not lost. My great-grandfather, Robert Clark Chappell, is buried there. Just a tiny plot, no more than maybe 8 or 10 graves. I’ve never stopped and looked at it. I should, but the traffic is heavy and there’s nowhere to pull off the road. I catch a glimpse out the side window as we pass.

I have seen the changes at the intersection with Hwy 155. I think I’m braced for it, but it’s been a while since I’ve come this way. It has grown exponentially. My old map still shows soybean fields and the old Maddox farmhouse on the corner.

I definitely need a new map.

I used to ride my bicycle this way. Hampton Road was a slow tar and gravel road. We passed the farm where Henry Nutt grew up. His older brother, Fears, was my Sunday School teacher once upon a time. It makes my stomach turn a little bit to see a subdivision sprawled out across the old fields, privacy fences built within a couple hundred feet of their farmhouse.

I pointed out the old Weems place to Marion. Some of the driveways where the school bus stopped. Simpson Mill Road where my uncles and aunts and cousins lived. Where I also rode my bike when it was a dirt road.

You probably already know this. I came this way to take a look at my homeplace. I can’t explain why I had butterflies in my stomach, but I did. I wasn’t sure if seeing it was a good idea or not. I just wanted to drive by it and take one more look. Not a last look. But a look down through the memories I still hold on to.

It surprised me how tired the house looked. With all the new development we had just ridden past, my home actually looked out of place. A relic of a time gone. Unkept. Unloved. Unwanted.

The place used to be alive in the springtime. The aroma of flowering trees. The sound of honeybees. Green pastures. The bellow of cows with new calves. The smell of the garden plowed. Pollen on the lake pushed up into the cove by the wind. The slamming of the screened door. A light on in the kitchen in the early morning.

“I thought you were gonna stop,” Marion said.

I didn’t. Maybe I couldn’t. I blamed the line of cars pushing from behind me, but I don’t think I had it in me to stop.

We drove on quietly. I’m looking straight ahead. I can tell Marion is watching me. When we topped the hill at the old Dupree place, she spoke.

“Here’s a difference between me and you. You have this deep emotional attachment to a home, to a place, to a time in your life that I don’t have.”

She was a military kid. Never anywhere more than two years at a time. She wasn’t being critical. Just observant. And she was right.

I do have an attachment. That small, little hundred acre farm is the source of just about everything I am. My strength. My faith. My love of the outdoors. My bruises and bumps. My hopes and dreams. All of it was planted there, nurtured there, and shaped there.

I won’t ever live there again. I don’t need to. That home, that place, that supper table, those fields…

They all live within me wherever I am.