Erased

In my life as an employee, I have worked in 7 locations:

1) Sweasy's Grocery, on Steele Street in Frankfort (until I turned 18)
2) The Frankfort Wal-Mart, at its original location where the Big K department store used to be (3 years)
3) The Frankfort Wal-Mart when it moved to its second location where Kohl's department store is now--at least, it was Kohl's last time I checked (1 year)
4) Lloyd High School, room 5 (1 year)
5) Lloyd High School, room 47 (13 years)
6) Lloyd High School library (2 years)
7) Erlanger-Elsmere Board of Education building (2 years)

I was thinking about this list as I drove in to work this morning. Here's what I realized:

1) Sweasy's Grocery burned to the ground in 1986. The lot sat empty for years. There is a house now where the store used to be.

2) The Frankfort Wal-Mart moved from its original location to its second location in 1989. The original building, last time I checked, was either a farm supply store or an office building. I forget which.

3) The Frankfort Wal-Mart moved from its second location sometime in the 1990's to its present location right off the interstate. The second location, as I mentioned above, is now a Kohl's department store.

4) The Erlanger-Elsmere Schools is in the process of building a new Lloyd High School. We're a small district, so we can't afford a 40 million dollar building all at once, so we're building it in 10 million dollar chunks. The first new wing was completed in April of this year, and beginning in May and continuing through this month, the construction company is tearing down the original front wing of the building to make way for the second wing. Room 5, which I taught in for one year (and Lisa taught in for 5 years) was torn down in May (In fact, I drove by the empty field where this classroom used to be as I came in to work today and that's what made me think of this).

5&6) Within the next six years or so the new Lloyd High School will be completely finished, and my classroom of 13 years--room 47--and the library will be torn down at that point. Of course, the one that's really going to bother me is when room 47 at Lloyd gets torn down. That was my classroom for 13 of the 14 years I taught, and there are a lot of memories there. When I walk by that classroom to this day I still peek inside to see what's going on, what's changed, what's still the same. I'll be sad when it's torn down.

And when that does happen, that will mean that the office I'm in right now is the only place I've ever worked that will still exist basically as it was when I worked there. That seems really strange for me. I guess it just points out to me the temporary nature of life. I mean, after all, if all of the places I worked can be erased and forgotten just like that, then one day I can be erased and forgotten, too!