My first movie was Peter and the Wolf at the East Stroudsburg Drive-In just off the Route 206 intersection. It was just behind the old IGA.  It was knocked down for a parking lot too many years ago now to remember.  Though since my visits to the Poconos became less frequent beyond my teens, numbers of years sort of sweep quickly together in a colored blur of absent memory.  The Drive-In, with it’s old frayed screen and rusted beams, had been long left to waste, swallowed with overgrowth by the time it was dismantled; an eye sore.  Within view was the house on the hill that the Jaycees used for their annual Halloween haunted fundraiser.  The best and scariest I’d ever been to than or now.  Sadistic bunch.                                                               –

They knocked that house down as well, at near the same time as the Drive-In.  It did look and did sound condemned back when parades of us would shuffle through the cellar door entrance in the dark, to the attic four flights up, into a room with a strobe light, painted white, with a crucified Jesus coming off of the cross and coming after you, with the thorns digging into his skull as the  blood makeup smeared down his face and around his eyes suggested. You can’t make that up.  Like I said. Sadistic bunch.  

The old haunted house was replaced with a church.  The old church that came before it sat on a small hill within view of both the house and the Drive-In. Though, I never recall thinking much about the old church, I remember the cemetery that sat just at it’s side wall.  A turn of the century cemetery.  Tightly packed with simple stones bloating from a fenced of Iron or aged wood.  I remember remembering the church first when it was gone.   A  cylindrical box-like building with a stucco like face of caked on layers of white paint, pale as powder.   The cemetery and the structure shared about an acre of clearing from the forest to the street.

One day however many years ago or later, I made the turn down that road and it was a new glassy and millennium-modern car dealership.  The scene of that car dealership against a colonial cemetery is what I remember most now.  But I want to, I guess, remember the old church instead.