Longing for Home
A Leaf Blowing in the Wind
Can a leaf ever put down roots?
As I was driving this afternoon I came across a Historical Marker — one that I must have passed countless times. It is for the town of Kimbro TX, an unincorporated entity that was founded in 1870 by Swedish, Danish and German immigrants. There are a lot Swedish towns scattered across the fields around this area, though as far as I can tell not many of them actually exist any more, except for their small cemeteries. Kimbro has a City Limit sign on highway 1100. Manda, Carlson and Lund just have historical markers and roads named after them. New Sweden has a church and a somewhat larger cemetery, though no town in the way that people think of towns now — a geographic location with crossing streets and avenues. Here there are fields of corn and other crops, and the occasional house. I read that general stores and schools once existed, but they are no longer around. (One of the schools has its own historical marker where a building used to stand.)
Maybe I’m still tired, but walking through the tiny Kimbro cemetery made me a little sad. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez observes that a new community has truly planted roots when it buries its first citizen and establishes a cemetery. I feel a little like a leaf blowing in the wind. Like I don’t have a…
