Memories and Old Salem

Sometimes memories come from the strangest of places. Yesterday I stood at the counter of a rented townhouse in central North Carolina cutting green onions for a salad. For a split second, I was transported back to California in the 1980s. I was just a child, in the kitchen or on the back porch of my grandparents' Whittier house -- I wasn't quite sure where, exactly -- and I was watching my grandmother cut green onions... probably for a big family dinner, in the days when my grandparents were both alive and our extended family had a thread, my grandfather, stitching the various parts together. I don't know if it was the smell, the texture, the crunch of the blade through the crisp green stalks or the dull thump of the knife on the cutting board, but the onions awakened a deep memory with surprising force and freshness. This was no cherished memory of a special moment; it was a long-forgotten ordinary moment, but when I lived it again, it became a treasure.

There are places that serve to sort of jog our collective memories, and this part of the South seems full of them. So many houses sag, in various stages of decay, where they proudly stood decades ago. There's a sense of connection to the past here that is missing from the orderly streets of California's gleaming new master-planned communities: a scent reminiscent of another time and place wafted on the winds over the fields once soaked with blood, or the sound of an old grandmother singing as she lays the laundry out to bleach in the sun.

Some of these places leave the memories to the imagination, where memorial plaques are absent and tour books are silent; others bring the past to life so vibrantly that you feel you were somehow there -- that you will leave remembering the faces and places alive with the life of another era when life was simple and hard. Old Salem is one of those places, and I found myself wandering its streets and shops and houses twice in the last week: once with Steve, Jayne, Thomas and Paul, and again with Daniel, Erik and Robyn.

Old Salem -- the birthplace of the latter half of what is now Winston Salem, NC -- was settled in 1766 by the Moravians, a protestant sect with German heritage who came from what is now part of the Czech Republic. They call themselves the first protestants, and they may be one of the earliest groups to break from the Roman Catholic church to have a continuous modern presence. They founded Bethlehem, PA, before moving in 1753 to "Wachovia," the nearly 100,000 acres they would call home in North Carolina.

Salem became the center of the Wachovia settlement, and it's location was settled by drawing lots. When God said "yes" via a piece of parchment (after saying "no" in other spots over several years), ground was broken for the new civic center of Moravian life. The town's buildings have since been lovingly restored and the streets and shops are peopled by costumed historical interpreters who demonstrate the way of life in the town from 1766 to the 1800s.

I'll let pictures do most of the talking from this point. They should tell you that Old Salem is a fascinating look at another era, and the sort of place where we can jog our human memory in individual ways, as it did for Robyn when she stood in a garden burgeoning with flowers and bustling with bees and said, "There's a smell here reminds me of my grandmother," and as a people. Ultimately, almost all of us have grown from foreign roots transplanted in American soil. And in Old Salem, we are reminded that those who came before us are not so far removed from us that we cannot touch and taste and smell their world.