Back in Lindsay

Somebody started up a "You know you came from Lindsay when..."  page on Facebook and I have been fascinated by it.

I was born and raised in that town. Everything that I am is based on what occurred in that little bitty town of 5,000 people. Everyone knew you and your family for the last three generations and everyone knew your business and the business of everyone else. If you got in trouble at the park, your parents knew about it before you got home. And there were no cell phones!

I have friends that I have known from birth. I don't remember not knowing my friend Vicki. Her mother and my mother were nurses together at the Lindsay Hospital. Vicki and I use to get up early, go to work with our mothers at 7AM, wait in the hospital waiting room and then walk to school together.

That hospital, small as it was, was central to my life. My mother worked there. Both my brothers worked there as orderlies at one time or another. I had my first surgery there. (an appendectomy when I was 8.) I played cribbage with my great-grandmother there the night before she died (at the age of 103). And I gave birth to my daughter in that hospital, in the same room that my mother gave birth to me.

The hospital was in the park. Where the pool was where I learned to swim and continued to swim through high school. Where the golf course was where I was actually allowed to play but mostly where father played. Where there were jungle gyms and swinging rings to play on and the dogs ran free.

But today, on the Facebook page I learned that it is gone. They tore it down. Lindsay does not have a hospital anymore.

The loss that I feel right now I can't explain. Of course they tore it down. It was old and I am sure that it was no longer operating as a hospital. Small towns can't afford such things anymore.

But it was a huge part of my life. My mother, my friend, my daughter all were centered there.

Now they are centered in my heart. And in my memories of the Lindsay District Hospital.