Further down Memory Lane

After our visit to Goldmount, seeing as we were so close, we took a little detour into Ceylon. I grew up there, I went to school in Ceylon from kindergarten through the 11th grade. All in the same building. K-12 was all housed in the same building there. Ceylon has no stoplights, and never has. There was a small grocery store, a coffee shop, 3 bars, a bank and a huge grain elevator.

Steven and I used to ride our bikes uptown and get a bag of candy at the grocery store for $5, and spend our summers riding our bikes around the town (and I mean AROUND the whole town) hanging out with our friends.

As I drove around, passing the house I grew up in, and seeing, around the corner, the home of one of the kids we hung out with, I explained things to Alex.

"See that empty lot? There was a big green rickety house on that corner, we always thought it was haunted, and one day, Steven and I caught a rabbit in that yard, we caught her and named her Chiquita, we kept her in a hutch by the garage"

"See that empty lot? My friend Jami used to live in a house there. It must have been torn down. She had two little brothers that were so horribly annoying. She and I used to play with Jason, the kid who lived just around the corner from my house and Jami's neighbors, Mike and Jason."

"Oh, wow, see that big empty lot? That's where the bowling alley was. They had 8 lanes that were so warped and curvy, it was hard to get a gutter ball, you really had to suck bad to get it into the gutter there. They made the best vanilla malts I have ever had. It was the malt flavor, really yummy..."

Just outside of town is a lake. I think it's called Clear Lake. In the winter, Steven and I would ride our bikes (yes...in the winter, in Minnesota, we still rode our bikes! snow pants, boots, the works, on our bikes!) with our ice skates tied together over our shoulders, and go out into the middle of that lake and skate like we were speed skaters. The wind would make that ice smooth as a Zamboni could, and we could skate like the wind blows! Funny how we never thought of the ice being too thin, of course, the deepest depths of Clear Lake was all of 10 feet.

In the summer, we would ride our bikes out to Clear Lake to the swimming beach. One of the few times I ever "parked" with a boy was at the beach of Clear Lake. Our year-end class field trips were to walk out to Clear Lake to go fishing.

It was sad to see the hill where the school used to be. I heard a few years ago that they were tearing it down. All the remaining kids were being bused to a county-wide school district that was being formed because apparently, what happened to Ceylon was happening to every small town in the county. So they combined the schools, and instead of several small town schools, there is one school in the entire county.

The whole time driving around town, I was smiling and remembering funny things, or good times, and yet, it made me sad. The town was dying... literally on it's last leg.