Isn't it amazing how certain images spark memories

When I see photos of farms I think of home. a morning photo with the buildings shrouded in fog and the fields disappearing into the gray murk.  I'm not talking about large farms or horse ranches, I'm talking Connecticut, Rhode Island rock strewn fields, stone walls, rail fence, hillsides, valleys, undulating fields with the familiar granite rocks sticking up here and there. Alongside the main fields the dark damp woods begin, fence-lines and fields decorated with golden rod, dragon-heads, and thistle. All this images spark memories which fire through my mind bringing thoughts of the comforts of home. 

The funny thing is, I've never lived on a farm, yet I have memories of walking on rock walls and wooden fences alongside and through fields. The deep dark damp smell of the forest and of decaying wood fences, or that of old hay and old barn wood run through my mind. Yet, as far as I can remember, even though these images are sharp, I have no recollection of where this happened. Are these comfortable feelings of home in somehow related to my childhood, traveling with my grand parents, they seemed to know everyone. 

I remember the smell of ground corn and meal as it was run between the stones of a grist mill. I have been in a grist mill, in Rhode Island, but the interior is not the Grist Mill I remember, it is more store like, more yuppie, more clean and touristy, not a working mill to keep the populous in grist. The Grist Mill that haunts me was large and empty, large beams crossing this way and that, Whitish bags of ground wheat and corn stacked against the walls, wooden wheels with wooden spokes and everything covered in corn dust. 

I remember carrying large bags of ground corn, but I cannot say when and where. Are all these memories from my childhood, a time when I was so young I can't remember the details. or perhaps, they filter down from times past, is it possible they are memories of a different life, when I was someone else, when the feeling of home did mean fences, fields, and a barn.

It's hard to say. I do remember fishing next to an old building when I was young, I was there with my father and grandfather who were talking to an old man leaning back on a chair and the building my father told me was a blacksmith shop, but there wasn't much work any more. In my teens we would walked on the rotted planks of that building, by then nothing more than a pile of rotting wood with swamp weeds growing up through the gaps in the wood. Now when you go by there is nothing but brush, even the swamp is gone, filled with sediment and grown over with grass and thin trees. perhaps the memories are real and of this life, but just like the black smith shop, filled in and overgrown with the thoughts and memories that late youth and adulthood produce.