A Return to Childhood Part IV

The six ducks across the street are in a line along the edge of the road grooming themselves. They’re fun to watch with the little tail wiggles and wing flaps. I hope the traffic slows for them.

Dear Mum,

You would've loved this property where I live now. The brook which can be seen from the house is amazing. We always loved the brooks, didn’t we? You would've been right down there cutting away all the brush, cleaning up the dead fall and debris, and making it look beautiful.

I remember how you always had the area under the pines looking so pretty. Do you know, they cut all those pines and the backyard is open (and … blah)? 

But alas, I am not you, and at this age, I cannot do that clearing work you loved. I am building flower gardens, though. I always admired your gardens and your love of the plants. I’m sorry I didn’t come into it while we could have done it together.

Forgive me?

Love you forever!

Yes, I talk to my mum almost every day. I don’t get a response. She just looks at me from her photo perch on the shelf across from where I write. But it dawned on me messages sometimes come through when I’m writing. I usually say it’s from The Muse. But maybe if I specifically write to mum, she might come through in my writing.

Contemplating loss of parents and learning to let go takes me on an interesting journey, and now that a few years have passed and the heartbreak lessened, I am able to look at our lives without falling totally apart (although I still get teary). I’m curious for answers to questions I never dared ask when she was alive. I want to know more family story, and for some reason, I hoped the recent trip to old family and childhood properties would trigger things I forgot.

There are things children don’t recognize when they’re young, and 60 years ago, family dynamics were different. Most kids just aren’t interested in family history, especially if the parents aren’t passionate about it. Still, I wanted something to stir within me. I wanted a memory, a feeling, a connection …

June 4 continued: Gail and I continued on to Kensington and the moment we crossed the border began, “Do you remember who lived there?” We pointed out buildings we remembered; some kept up and renovated, some looking the same, while others falling to decay. There were new buildings interspersed and other additions to the landscape.

Oh, here’s a spot where an old trail used to come out onto the main road and is now a housing development. And on this trail which ran beside a familiar-looking home was where my brother and I once found a watermelon in the brook.

Imagine two kids, we must’ve been 8 and 10, finding a watermelon in the brook on a hot summer day. Wow! What a treasure! Of course, we rescued it, broke it open on a rock, and stuffed ourselves silly on the delectable, juicy morsels.

Needless to say, mum was looking for us before we got home. The people who put the watermelon in the brook to keep it cool, saw us take it and went immediately to phone our mother. Hey, we were kids. It never occurred to us someone would purposely put a watermelon in the brook!

Where the American Legion is now was once a little store called The Bird Cage (we called it the shit shack.) I remember it being a small, two-room, dingy, crowded place smelling of dust and cigarettes. He had parakeets and sold penny candy and cigarettes, and out back he had lots of books we could take and read. (I was the reader.)

The two corner houses were similar and I remember the families who lived there. Then we turned the corner onto our street, down the hill into what we called the hollow, then up as we approached our old homes.

Gail’s old house still stood bright and white looking almost exactly the same, though kept up with fresh paint and all. She remarked how the two old maple trees bordering the driveway had been cut down long ago.

My childhood home is gone!

But my eyes strayed across the street and my heart dropped into my belly. My house was GONE! There wasn’t anything recognizable. Any remnant of the building was gone, and vegetation, brush, and saplings covered the once-huge lawn and property leaving only a small reseeded level spot of ground where the house once stood. It didn’t even look big enough to have held the house I called home in my youngest years.  

I pulled into the driveway (which now extended to connect to Gail’s father’s old driveway to the farm “down back”) and we got out. My mind was numb. I couldn’t even find words, except to say how small the house footprint looked.

Gail pointed to two trees on either side of the driveway. “Do you think these are the same two trees we used to climb?” I wasn’t sure. After 57 years or so, wouldn’t they look bigger? I stood there trying to take it in. I was in such shock, I couldn’t even cry.

A man was walking by and I waved him over. He said the property had been abandoned for years and was foreclosed on. It was recently sold to Alan Lewis. Hey, that’s Gail’s cousin who had bought her dad’s old farm and had even bought my uncle’s property years ago off my dad.

We got back in the car and continued down the driveway to her dad’s old farm. The dirt road followed a ridge top, one side went down to where dad once had his chicken coops and pig pens and the other side down to the brook (what we called First Brook). Nothing looked the same. The road dipped down and crossed the brook at an intersection where the new driveway to the property merged with the old. Yes, there was the brook where Don, and Gail’s youngest brother Lyle tried to teach the baby chicks to swim (after all, the baby ducks could) and the swamp on the left where we learned to ice skate (which looked way more open now than I remembered).

To the left was the old trail leading to what we called the Second Brook, but again, although there was still a trail, it wasn’t the trail of my childhood. Farther up was a large parking area for visitors to the “new” farm/retreat property. I wouldn’t be able to walk up the hill, so Gail said to keep going. We had permission, after all.

We emerged from the wooded area onto what had been the farm, a piggery and huge gardens when Gail’s dad lived here. Now it was a huge expanse of manicured lawn continuing up. To the left was a renovated cabin named after Gail’s dad which he had lived in. There were other cabins, each set up with their own private space.

Someone directed us to continue up the hill, around a huge building which now houses meeting rooms and social areas, and through a stretch of woods where there was to be a ceremony Gail wanted to attend.

I immediately felt out of place. The energy here was wrong; not bad, just not the land of my childhood. The road twisted around trees and we came out into a field where exhibition tents were set up. Off to the right, looking like it was emerging out of the tall field grass, was a humungous black sculpture of a gorilla. What? Like that fits in here? It was ugly.

We got out. I realized this field was what we’d called The Big Hill. I spent a lot of time up here. This was my go-to place, the place where I came after school to recover from the name-calling and out casting of school mates. It was a great sledding hill, but once at the bottom, it was a long way back up trudging through snow.

I pointed down the hill to a group of trees and told Gail of the old foundation there and how my puppy fell down an open well and how her dad came and rescued the pup. He later put wood over the well so other critters couldn’t fall in.

Next to the trees in the middle of hill going down were two huge silver-metal sculptures of faces – so out of place in this serene setting. Other than those modern sculptures, the hill looked the same … but I didn’t want to stay. The people gathering were strangers and it all felt wrong to me.

I fought to find words to apologize to Gail and say if she wanted to stay, I’d wait below. I didn’t want to disappoint her. I found the words and she said she didn’t want to stay either. We returned down the twisty-turny path and back onto the old farmland. We stopped to inspect a life-size buffalo sculpture and sat on a bench near the rock where two of her brothers were buried.

There was another sculpture (I guess you’d call it a sculpture) nearby in a smaller section of now-manicured lawn. It looked like a long Loch Ness serpent made of bright red lobster trap rope undulating in the green grass. It was ugly and did not fit in with the landscape at all. To me, it looked like an armature of something being developed, but it’d been like this for years. It reminded Gail of something kids were supposed to play on.

The sun was warm after the cold of the morning at the beaches. Gail pointed out places she remembered, and we shared stories. My favorite memory of this property was, when we were little, Gail’s dad had a big party every summer inviting friends and neighbors. There’d be a huge cook-out; we’d play dodgeball, tag and hide ‘n’ seek; explore the woods, light off fireworks (which I’ve always hated), but the best part was the singalong around the campfire after dark.

An employee came by and talked about the people coming to this ceremony. I looked at Gail, “I really don’t want to be here,” and she agreed. This wasn’t our land anymore. We didn’t belong here, and we drove away passing many out of state cars and a few more sculptures that looked like they’d be better off at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, not here in a forested landscape.

I made one more stop at my old home and hiked down the field to peer into the woods. I called out to Gail who waited in the car, “These forsythias might be from mum’s old big bush!” I tried to look past the trees bordering the field. The field, too, has been encroached upon by Mother Nature. I just wanted one glimpse of something familiar, but it wasn’t to be.

We made the loop around the other way in leaving, driving past my second house, which still looks the same shape only a different color and all the pines in the back are gone. We passed the old farm where my dad grew up, its barn now gone. Then onto the road where my uncle lived, I was shocked to see his house looked exactly the same (on the outside) as when he was alive. (It’s now one of Lewis’ guest camps.)

We stopped for sandwiches to take back to our rental. My emotions were all over the place. I still hadn’t pieced it all together, still not sure of what I was really looking for, let alone deciphering how or why I didn’t find it.

Back on my computer, I wrote a poem:

There’s No Going Back

We returned, Gail and I,

to our childhood homes and land

ready to share the experience

of trudging down memory lane together

I anticipated emotional outpouring

expecting scenes from long ago

to trigger childhood memories

I can’t remember

I anticipated sentimental reaction

and a falling of lots of tears

as the land I grew up on

wrapped me in a comfort of what I once knew

I anticipated finding release

as feelings flooded my being

eyes overflowing

triggered by delights of childhood now lost

But there was nothing here

the landscape totally changed

even to the demolition of my old home

and what was left unrecognizable

Speechless, stunned and feeling empty,

I couldn’t even cry

The land did not call to us

its energy no longer matched ours

My eyes strained to find familiar

my being searching for the old roots

of what was once my home

and what once encompassed blended family

Her dad’s old property, too

its scenes no longer familiar

the now manicured and manipulated landscape

as foreign as other people arriving

The place, though beautiful,

felt cold and alien

strange modern sculptures created a wrong feeling

not fitting in with the landscape … as we knew it

We pointed and exclaimed, “Remember …,”

but words stuck in our throats

as memory didn’t match what we were seeing

we didn’t belong here anymore

This place was no longer home

to two little girls

who ran barefoot through tall grasses

and dared to ride pigs

It was time to leave.

The past is the past

there’s no going back

but for a short time,

I so wished for a return to simpler times.

--Sasha Wolfe, 2019

The journey of living wholeheartedly and delving back into the past has its rewards even if I’m not getting the answers I expected. The land may no longer be mine or I belong to it, but there are still memories of happy childhood times.