Photo courtesy of burcubyzt 85

Living Madly: Lost Worlds

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

On my website, I often write essays about places, and sometimes people, that were once an integral part of my life but today no longer exist. Some of them are part of what I call the Lost World Series, but there are others that aren’t titled this way. I write a new one every so often when an idea strikes me. But they are difficult to write, as they inevitably dredge up old feelings and memories I’d forgotten about, which almost always makes me feel nostalgic and wistful.

The idea to write about vanished places was inspired by a photographer I knew when I was younger. He had a website dedicated to photographs of places he’d once visited that were gone: the Word Trade Center in New York; Soviet Moscow; pre-revolutionary Cuba; old movie theaters; the Berlin Wall. Sometimes the photos had people in them: a gas station attendant checking someone’s oil; women hanging laundry on a clothesline.

Looking at these images, I couldn’t help but think about the people these lost places had touched, what their everyday lives had been like. I also felt grateful that this photographer had shot these photos, and that he had decided to make them available to the public. Because people—all of us—have a tendency to lose sight of the past, to forget the places, their sights and sounds and smells, both good and bad, that make up the building blocks of our lives, our families, our cultures, even ourselves.

It’s also important, I think, to share memories of lost places with people who weren’t around to see them. It helps the places live on in way, and it fosters a better, more ground-level understanding of where and from whom we came, and how we arrived where we are.

It’s good to know the grocery store parking lot used to be a corn field, for example, that the asphalt wasn’t inevitable. Knowledge such as this helps us appreciate that although the sacrifices of those who came before us have made our lives more convenient, they have also sometimes made them meaner.

On a personal level, writing about lost places that were once part of my life has helped me see significance in things I never considered valuable. It’s helped me understand where many of my ideas, preferences, and opinions originated.

Last year, for instance, I wrote an essay about how my elementary school, which my grandfather and his three brothers had also attended, was bulldozed by a real estate developer when I was eleven years old. I was sad about it at the time. I knew it was incredibly unfair, but I wasn’t able to put my finger on why that was.

In writing about it, I was able to see the circumstances surrounding the school’s destruction more clearly: My neighborhood was mainly made up of poor and working-class immigrant families; the school building had been neglected and needed costly renovations; there was money to be made by building houses on the land.

Today, the people living in the neighborhood where I grew up are upper middle class. Few of them are even aware that there was once an elementary school on the corner of Greenhood and Colburn. They don’t know about the families who once lived there, how they emigrated from Quebec and Ireland, Poland and Italy to give their children a chance at a better life. When they sit out on their porches in the evening, they don’t hear French or Gaelic. They don’t smell sausages and tomatoes and garlic cooking.

I’ve come to understand that when a place is lost, even if it’s a rundown elementary school in a poor immigrant neighborhood, an entire world vanishes. It might not disappear all at once. Usually it fades away slowly, like a newspaper left out in the sun, which is worse in way because it makes it harder for anyone to notice when it’s finally gone.

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Emilie-Noelle Provost (she/her) – Author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit her at emilienoelleprovost.com.