The Old Hometown

I spent some time in my hometown of Mexia, Texas, this weekend, and, as usual, I left feeing about a million years old.

This time I did a couple of things. I stopped in at the site of the former Eubanks Hardware Store (which is now a sort of antiques mini-mall) to buy something to read (more about that later, maybe). Standing on the sidewalk out front, I noticed how oddly quiet it was. When I was a kid, the whole downtown was alive on Saturday afternoons. Now, there wasn't a sound. Nothing. There were no cars parked along the street, and the buildings on the other side have long since been knocked down. It was an eerie feeling, standing there in all that quiet.

After I left there, I drove down the block and stopped in front of the lot where the Farrar Lumber Company once stood. My grandfather worked a the lumber yard for many years, and I used to walk there from our house to visit him or just play around in the lumber. I could still draw you a pretty good floor plan of the main office, with its high counter on one side, the stairs at the back leading up to the second floor, the bench and the big pot-bellied stove opposite the counter. There's nothing there now.

Across the street is the building that once housed the town's Buick dealership, where my father bought our baby-blue Buick Special four-door hardtop in 1956. I can't even begin to describe what a thrill it was to drive around in a car like that. (It drove like a tank, by the way, since it didn't have power steering; but who cared?) The building became a pawn shop at one time after the Buick dealership closed, but even that sign is pretty much faded away now. There are bushes and trees growing all around the building, right up against the brick wall. A big portion of the roof has fallen in, and you can see the sky through the second story windows.

The back of the second floor used to be some sort of residential hotel. The roof is still over those rooms, but the windows are completely missing. You can look through them at see how small the rooms were. You can see the transoms over the doors. There appears to have been one light in each room, a bulb screwed into a socket that hangs down from the ceiling on a braided electrical cord. The odd thing is that in all three rooms I could see into, the light bulbs are still there, right where they've been for who knows how long. I never knew who lived in those rooms or what their lives must have been like. I probably couldn't even guess.