I went for a drive last week into what was my distant past. My goal was to look at some places and things that were a part of that past but had been squeezed aside by such things as work, family responsibilities and time. I wanted to see if things were the same.

The beginning of The Southern Shore was my destination because in my youth I had worked there and in my early years my family had spent our summers there. My destination was Bay Bulls, and the first stop was Mount Loretta Cemetery of all places. You can see it across a valley as you come down the hill leading into the town. People say cemetery now, but we always called it the graveyard. My great-great Uncle James is buried there. The family story told me that. I am no longer sure where Uncle James’ grave is and all the people who did know are now dead.

As a boy I often walked up the road from the town to the graveyard which was then on the edge of Bay Bulls. To get there you had to cross over a common pastureland known then as The Green. It is said that at twilight the fairies danced on The Green. You had to be careful. It is only new modern houses that dance there. The world into which I was born was filled with stories about things like fairies. Those stories came to us from Ireland. I certainly believed in them. Grandmother Malone refused to eat blueberries from that Bay Bulls graveyard. The blueberries there were the size of grapes, but grandmother insisted it just wasn’t the right thing to do. Blueberries still grow in that area, but they aren’t as big now.

It rained when I visited last week so I was alone with my thoughts and the headstones and the quiet. My aunt and uncle are both buried in Bay Bulls. Three of their children who were my first cousins are buried there as well. It was a family of five. Now only one remains alive.

The names on the graves in the Mount Loretta Cemetery were so familiar to me. They were Bay Bulls names like Maloney, O’Brien, Gatherall, Lynch and Puddester. I saw the grave of old Paddy Scott who had the general store down on the cliff and the graves of Jack and Edith Crane who had their store just as you entered Bay Bulls. Clem Maloney’s store overlooking the harbour had the first Coke machine I ever saw.

It is a different town now then the one I knew but, in many ways, it is just as I left it. The geography is mostly unchanged. The land is forever. The Ridge is still there and the Quays and Bread and Cheese, the Alley, and the Marsh. Grandmother called it the “Mash”. It is there in that area down the harbour in Bay Bulls that I remember women washing their clothes in the river and beating them on the rocks to rinse them out. You think that is stuff from another century, but it isn’t. It is from my time.

That was all over 70 years ago now. In summer our family rented a house from the O’Brien’s and later we rented another from the Lynch’s on the other side of the harbour. The house I remember best though was that of Con Aspell up by the bridge. The little bungalow that we rented from the Aspell’s is still there. I walked quietly by it last week and looked at the window that was once my bedroom an exceptionally long time ago. It is there in a lane by that house that I learned to ride my bike for the first time. I smiled when I noticed the lane is now called Con Aspell’s Lane.

The day “up the shore” was a trip back in time. It was as though I could see the things of my past, but they weren’t sharp images. It was like looking at them through a piece of gauze. They were dream-like. That is way those things work.

My takeaway from it all is that most profound of human questions – “Where have the years gone?”

You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]