I didn't know why I was homesick but I was longing to see the town. No close relatives live there now and I moved away 45 years ago but I still think of it as my hometown. I was born in La Junta and lived there off and on for many years. My great, great Aunt Sarah came to La Junta in a covered wagon when she was three years old, with her parents and 10 brothers and sisters. My Grandpa Miller was born there and so was my Dad. Both of my grandfathers worked and retired from the Santa Fe Railroad in La Junta. When my family went home we went to La Junta.

So I guess it was no wonder that after being away for 45 years I was homesick for a town and the memories that still live there. My dad and my grandparents are dead, Aunt Sarah is gone too, but I wanted to see the town again. I think I was homesick for my childhood. I wanted to walk down the streets in town like I did when I was a girl. I wanted to see my loved ones again. I had an immense desire to return to those days.

In August of this year my sister, her daughter, granddaughter and friend came to Colorado. I met them in Limon and we took a trip down memory lane to La Junta.

Aunt Sarah's house is gone. It only stands in my memory as a home where a sweet old lady welcomed my young family. The adobe dwelling was built by her father and brothers in the late 1880's. After her death when she was 97 years old, my cousin and her family lived in her house and made it into a Christian Coffee House for troubled teenagers. They named it "Bridge over Troubled Waters." They moved their ministry to south of La Junta and the property was probably condemned by the Highway Department. Now cars on a four-lane highway speed by a fast food restaurant located where a little white house on the prairie stood by an old country trail where wagons once stopped overnight.

We drove past my Grandma and Grandpa Wilson's house; new siding gave it a healthy look. Then we went on to Edison Street where Grandma and Grandpa Miller lived in a two-story home. It is shabby, unpainted and sad. The alley behind, where Grandpa grew rainbow colored Hollyhocks, is gone. My parents' home across that alley and the beloved house next door, that my husband built so many years ago, is missing. Now it's part of the schoolyard in back of the New Columbian School. That "new" school was built in 1946. I went to the 6th grade in the Old Columbian School. It burned down shortly after I started Junior High School.

The little park on the next block where Patty Jo Scantlin and I played house is there. It is on the street I still walk in my dreams. The neighborhood hangout, Klein's Grocery Store, looks empty because it is no longer a teenage soda fountain. The building has been made into apartments.

We went by the shady park where the ghosts of long-ago picnics drifted through my memory. There are huge trees and a wonderful lake. I remember crawling through a pipe that ran into the lake. Of course there was no water in it.

The old Fox Theater where I worked as an usher when I was 18, young and in love, still looks the same.

We went through the Koshare museum and Kiva. Pictures of boys who were in my class hang on the upstairs walls. It's hard to think that these young men, who in native costume danced on nimble feet on the grasses of the football stadium, are like me, old and gray or gone now.

Even though La Junta sits in the middle of the prairie, south of town is a wonderful place we called the "cedars." There are rolling hills dotted with cedar trees and red tinged rocks. My grandfather homesteaded a place near those majestic plateaus. I have old pictures of the family climbing the towering rocks. My mother and father especially loved to go to the cedars and I did too until my sister left home. Then I was lonely.

"Do you want to go to the cedars with us?" My mother would ask.

"If Patty Jo can go," I answered. They invariably agreed and I ran to Patty Jo's house, two doors down the block and asked her if she could go. We were soon headed out of town to our favorite picnic spot. As soon as we got out to the cedar country Daddy let Patty Jo and I ride on the big fenders. He drove very slowly -- Daddy was an extremely cautious driver, but it felt fast to me as the wind blew through my hair. Children can't ride on fenders anymore, there are no fenders.

We usually roasted wieners over a campfire. There was plenty of cedar wood to burn and many other picnickers had used the same rock fireplaces. As we held long sticks with our hot dogs on them the fire roasted them to a dark shade and our dessert was usually toasted marshmallows. "Smoke follows beauty." I can still hear the laughter as the smoke blew in our eyes. When we moved the smoke followed. After lunch we climbed the rocky hills.

My parents went to another spot much farther down in the beautiful cedar country and there they found pictures that had been carved on the steep rock walls many years before.

When I was in high school I spent an unforgettable weekend with a girlfriend whose parents lived by the river in the cedars. Her father was a ditch rider and we rode in a car on a cable over the Picketwire River. The rocky hills stood in back of their home. I still remember the bright full moon that shone behind the dark foothills as we went to a supper where beautifully decorated boxes were auctioned off to the highest bidder.

One time a neighbor girl asked Patty Jo and I to go to the cedars with them. They had a car with a rumble seat in it and the three of us sat in that. We went far down into the canyons. That was my one and only unique experience of riding in a rumble seat. It was fun.

Patty Jo lives in Commerce City now and I see her once in awhile. She tells me she remembers those trips to the cedars more than anything else about my parents.

Today the cedars are fenced off. Only in our memories can we climb those rocks and toast wieners over a bonfire. We can't cross over the fences.

This summer as we drove through the cedars we found a lovely picnic spot with three covered shelters, near where we once picnicked. A pathway goes to the ruins of a 300-year-old stagecoach. My sister and her family and I had an evening picnic.

Since our trip down memory lane I'm no longer homesick. I found old memories and gained some new ones.