trillian

A friend of mine mentioned he was going to Jamestown this weekend to visit friends. As soon as I heard this I was flooded with memories, it seemed like a dam broke in my head.
I remember as a child when we would go camping at Pinecrest Lake we would always take a little stop off in Jamestown. My parents had a friend that lived out in a mobile home in the woods. Oh how I remember how that place invoked so many different feelings in me. The pure silence of the night sitting on the porch as my mother combed my hair before she put my brother and I to sleep.That silence, that darkness scared the living crap out of me, wondering what was beyond the light, lying in the woods waiting for us to go to sleep but feeling a sense of safety being in the middle of nowhere, so many stars in the sky, listening to the crickets, admiring the beauty. We would wake up in the morning and eat a large breakfast and if we were lucky, the friend of the family would take us exploring before we left to the campgrounds. I remember going to the old mines where many years beforehand people would hope to strike it rich by finding gold. TThe smell of gunpowder still lingered in these places and we had to make sure never to shine our flashlights upward for you could hear the bats rustling around up there.
Sometimes we would go down to the lake and he taught us how to pan for gold. We had little vials of water wirh small flakes of gold floating in there sitting on our mantel at home from such trips.
I loved this place as a child, and would describe it to the other children on the school yard who never knew what in the hell I was talking about. I grew up and still told people about this place but very few knew where I was talking about so slowly but surely it regressed back into my memory. The sweet innocence of childhood.