Once I traveled from the rock strewn hills of the Missouri Ozarks down into the Arkansas mountains and across to the Delta of the great Mississippi River. Our car carried us across to Memphis, to Beale Street where the music never stopped and to Elvis Presley’s estate of Graceland.   It sounds strange now but we rode a bus from the center across the street to the mansion and that night we stayed in a hotel so near that we could stand on the balcony and see Graceland. In the early morning cool of Memphis we took yellow roses to lay on the King’s grave, part of a silent, somber parade of faithful fans that leave pieces of their hearts and souls in tribute for music remembered.

On the same journey we headed South through the Delta where catfish and the blues once vied to be king. We saw cotton white beneath a summer sun and watched rattlesnakes escape flooded ditches to bask in the summer that thrust aside the clouds.

We saw the battlefield at Vicksburg and spent the night in Natchez where the flavor of the Old South lingers like garlic on the tongue, rich and flavorful yet sharp. Across the mid-South I watched the bright green kudzu climbing over everything, a trespasser and thief combined.

At long last we reached the Gulf Coast, the shining sea that reflected blue from the skies above with false serenity that lasted between storms.   This was before the powerful hurricanes pounded the coast into rubble and destroyed decades, erasing them as easily as the tide wiped away the names we wrote in the sand.

Standing at the point where the land ends and the ocean spreads into infinity made me feel small and yet grand, part of a large universe beyond my ken. I splashed in the waters and tiny fish darted between my toes, nibbling and tasting. We rode the waves into the beach and laughed as the sea water filled our noses. I remember the warmth of the sun on my shoulders and the fiery pain of the sunburn that appeared, scarlet and blistered on my inland bred skin.

When I tell my grandchildren of these places, about my journey, they listen but they do not believe. Such stories are fairy tales to them because they know that no one could ever, not in a single lifetime, travel so far from home. Not one of them has been more than five miles distant from this hard scrabble patch of earth we call home. They can not envision the sweeping expanse of sky over water because they know nothing but the trees that stand to shield them from the sun.

My older children remember a little about that vacation, a word that now has no meaning because going away for pleasure is as dead as the dinosaurs that I learned about in school. I remain, an aged crone in a medieval world with nothing but memories to summon our lost world, the world we knew before the fuel reserves gave out and left us in the dark.

In the beginning, these times were called The New Dark Ages, one of those catchy terms that the media dreamed up to describe each major event. The term lasted until the power vanished as surely as the fossil fuels we used to drive our vehicles far from home.

After fifty years, the roads where I once drove and let the wind rush over my skin in the summer are overgrown with forest, with weeds. What remains of the pavement is broken and all but indistinguishable from rocks, the rocks that still hold fossils of the sea from a flood eons ago. My last car, a pretty Cadillac, rests in the woods near here, rusted and faded. I can still see the shape of it but those born after cannot. It is nothing to them, junk from the past that has no meaning, no use.

I remember so well the aged home places that were still tucked into deep hollows in my time, faded and weatherworn houses that lingered long after the families had gone to town or to the grave. They haunted me then and lived in my soul because I felt the faint essence of life that remained.    I hope that a few of the young here feel that siren call to the past but I doubt it. Children have no time to dream and imagination is a luxury.

To survive, we work, all of us, from cradle to the grave. If we fail to raise enough crops during the sweltering summers, then we do not eat in the harsh winters, months when blizzards sweep down like hungry wolves from the sky. When I was a little girl, we prayed for snow so that school could be cancelled and we could ride our sleds downhill with joy. We made snowmen and stuck old hats atop their frozen heads in fun that is now forgotten. Snow now means cold beyond any I ever knew back then.   Snow is a just another element to struggle against, something to survive.

When I, even at my advanced age, gather firewood by scavenging the forest floor each day, think of central heat, my bones long for the steady warmth, the easy availability that ended almost without warning. On summer days when sweat soaks my worn clothing and irritates my skin into prickly heat, I remember the quiet cool comfort of air conditioning but it is like a distant dream.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who wrote that the world would end in ice, not fire and that it would go out with a whimper rather than a bang. He was more prophet than poet because when things came to a stop, when life as we knew it ended, it was without warning.

Life in the early 21^st century was moving along as it had and we thought it would be forever. We rose in the morning to comfort, cooked our ready made breakfast in the microwave oven, took a warm shower and drove many miles to work in our cars, singing along to the music we loved and waving at the other drivers. On the drive to work -- we called it a commute -- we might take a few moments to admire the first flowers of spring or the blazing colors of autumn leaves but our thoughts turned mostly toward work.

We talked on cell phones as we drove and no one, not man, woman, or child, was without a phone in hand. At work, we sat at desks beneath brilliant lighting and did our work on computers, lazy and complacent.

Food was not all prepared over open fires or in wood stoves stolen from somewhere three decades or more ago.  Food did not have to be killed or collected or preserved. By the end, most of us were so self-indulged, so spoiled that we bought our food prepared to heat at home or ate in restaurants where someone else prepared it. When I tell that to the grandchildren they laugh, certain that Grandmammy has gone silly in her old age because a place where you paid someone to provide cooked food is impossible in their life.

I told them once of buffets, of the massive restaurants that had multiple bars of various foods and their eyes went wide, round and huge. Descriptions of things like Szechwan beef defy description and large quantities of food are beyond imagining. Long before their birth, the remaining store of things like sugar, coffee, and oatmeal were gone, culled from the supermarket shelves.

I am old now and my journey long past. After I am gone, maybe they will remember and tell the story. It might become a myth, a legend that lives on to share around the hearth for generations to come. I hope so.

Something should remain, some scrap of all we had as Americans should be kept to remember the golden years when gasoline flowed like an endless river and we were laughing people on the move.

It is cold now inside the old farmhouse, the winds make me shiver and rain drips through the holes in the roof. I will poke up the fire one last time and go to bed to dream of the plenty that we knew that was lost before we realized it was gone.