Travelin' On . . . by Margaret Dornaus

. . My mother and I are returning home from a day trip to a Victorian village nestled in the hills of the Ozarks.  It’s a short drive from our house, the one I returned to after leaving New York in order to help my mother live out the remainder of her days surrounded by the possessions she prizes, an eclectic assortment of antiques collected over a lifetime—wine red curios,equalpartscandelabras and magic lanterns sporting portraits of mustachioed Turkish warlords, she picked up one day back in the ‘50s on a shopping trip to Seidenbach’s Department Store; a century-old, rustic buffet and china cabinet of walnut that she purchased from her former law school dean before she and my father set up housekeeping in the late 1930s;  a well-worn bluevelvetVictorianloveseat she wrangled from a now-departed sister some time in the ’60s.  It’s late January—one of those rare, balmy winter days that occasionally happens in Arkansas—and we’ve taken advantage of the break in weather by heading east to the tiny hill town of Eureka Springs. For nine months of the year, Eureka’s cobblestoned streets ring with the heavy tread of visitors lured by the village’s Victorian architecture—authentic nineteenth-century cupolas and gingerbread—combined with all manner of trendy galleries, spas and boutiques, tacky tourist shops, kitschystreetfareálà sugary funnel cakes, gigantic baked pretzels and spun cotton candy, and a compound that hosts a Passion Play featuring live camels and bearded locals tracing Christ’s life and  resurrection in a spectacle meant to rival Germany’s Oberammergau.  In January, however, Eureka is all but abandoned—left, for the most part, to its one thousand  or so year-round residents who burrow in for the off-season to store up enough energy to put on their public faces come Spring. This more private Eureka is the one my family fell in love with more than thirty years ago when we—transplanted Okies—went wandering to explore our new environs.  During three decades, we have made the trek to a town that has charmed us many times and in all seasons, but winter—when it’s quiet, with only the bones of its more glamorous incarnations showing—is the one that makes us feel we share Eureka with those who appreciate her fully, whether she’s dressed in her best finery as a painted lady or draped in a shawl of gray. . . . Eureka has been there for us.  A place we go to when we need to feel uplifted, connected to the past as much as to the present.  My mother remembers dawn picnics on the lake just outside of town,cookingkielbasa and coffee over the park’s stand-up grills as she and her second husband watched the mist rise on a winter’s day.  And me?  When I think of Eureka, it’s as much of the people as the place: a wild man named Bob, dead now like both my mother’s husbands, who lived like an untamed creature on the fringes of society in a way that I never could and who challenged me to do more with myself, to write something that made a difference, to care about myself more than he could—or anyone else could, for that matter.

‘As we head west out of town, winter’s light—the kind that’s clear and golden and makes you want to testify—bathes us and the receding streets with more warmth as the sun begins to set.  It’s then that my mother, one eye to the future, says to me, “Perhaps you can live here.” When I’m gone, she means, but she doesn’t have to say more.‘

This day, though, we’re in the present as much as we can be.  We’ve wandered through the few shops that are open; ambled through a woodland chapel that seamlessly unites form and function in a style reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s; driven to the crest overlooking town for a panorama of the surrounding valley—the Passion Play’s mammoth Christ of the Ozarks standing with frozen, outstretched arms like a monstrous man-made sentinel over the otherwise tranquil setting.  It’s been a good day.  We’re happy. As we head west out of town, winter’s light—the kind that’s clear and golden and makes you want to testify—bathes us and the receding streets with more warmth as the sun begins to set.  It’s then that my mother, one eye to the future, says to me, “Perhaps you can live here.”  When I’m gone, she means, but she doesn’t have to say more. . . .