Where we are in place and time

I have been to Onaway School dozens of times, maybe even a hundred, and every time I drive up, I think, 'Ah, Onaway, this is where my mother went to elementary school.' 

It's a odd good coincidence that I have ended up teaching  for the same district my mother attended even though I grew up 132 miles from there.  Her first job was actually at my school's playground. 

Today I had a meeting at Onaway, so I drove up and thought the same lovely thought I always think, but once I got inside, it really struck me in a way I had never understood before: my mother actually went to this school.  She walked on the same tile floor that I was walking on.  She held the same worn wooden railing when climbing the steps.  She played in the gym that I had just walked past.  She spent time in the room that I was heading toward.  The blacktop was her recess area. This is where she jumped rope with Janet Prindle.  My mother went to this school.  

And when she was there, she was a little girl.  Someone who did not know how to read. Then did.  She was just a kid with loopy handwriting, bruises on her knees. A child. My mother. Here. 

Then I thought about how we all share space across time.  How the antique dresser in my bedroom was once owned by someone else.  A man, woman?  Where? I thought about my house, how other people have lived in it.  How one woman died there.  Just old, not sick.   I'm not sure who else has walked on my floors.  I don't know who else opened and closed my medicine cabinet.  

I thought about the thousands of fans who have sat in the same Jacob's Field seat, seeing hundreds of thousands of pitches. The thousands of people who been in the same movie theater, transfixed.  The simple civil way we share the roads.  

I thought about the time I walked the same Agora as Socrates.  How, just thinking that, I cried.  And the bend in the Colorado River in Utah.  Some explorer once stood in the exact same place as me, with the same awe and feeling of being overcome. 

And I even thought about how six billion people saw the same full moon tonight. And that moon is the same moon my mother saw when she was a child.    

How do these places hold then release each of us?  How do these places yield to so many people over  time? 

My mother went to Onaway School.  She walked on the same slate sidewalk I tread today.  There's some kind of crazy loveliness in that.  Something that feels tipped in grace and wonder.