I often forget I'm quite grown up now. I am nearly twenty years old and yet I frequently find myself making references to "Well when
I grow up I'll..." and then I break off short, realizing that the time that seemed ages and ages in the future as a little girl, is now at hand. But I seldom realize how rosy the spectacles of childhood are till I encounter something from days gone by and realize how different thing are than I remember.
Take our dear old Smoke Tree, for example. This was the house that I lived for the first fourteen years of my girlhood. The founding years of my life were spent in this little townhouse with the green shutters and the green bushes, the lacey, green elm and the high green hill rolling up behind. As a child I felt The Hill was Mount Everest itself--as a very little girl it tired me just to walk up it. I knew every inch of that hill. I knew where the dandelions grew thickest, I knew where the "blue-bells" were to be found. I knew when to walk through the freshly cut grass and when it was better to wait. There was even a "soft-patch" where someone had planted a different kind of grass than what straggled over every other spot on that hill.
We named the places and had daring adventures at the Three-Trees, on The Peninsula, in The Bamboo, at the Big Tree. There was The Canal with the side-walk that felt ten miles long and the dark, mysterious "tunnel" all spangled over with water-shadows and light. There were the ugly, Muscovy ducks that we knew as distinct people: Penny who could "play basketball" by catching food in her bill, the white-headed female, the hissing male, the pair of modest mallards. There were the rabbits that streaked through the yard now and then. There were the fat robins, redder and rounder than any I've encountered since.
We reigned over our little domicile as kings and queens, and we did own it, as only children can. When we felt extremely daring and fiercesome and quite unconquerable we would make a foray into Doxey Park with its deep, cool, emerald-green moss, it's forbidding, alluring, gigantic trees. It was the Hundred-Acre wood. It was Narnia itself. There was magic in these places of my childhood, and I actually cried when we left, wondering if there could be a better place in the world.
That was six years ago. I was back in town earlier this week and Dad thought it might be nice to go to the old neighborhood and drive about. So we did. I wanted to see what it was like now, and yet I had a feeling it would not be the same. I rather dreaded it, in a funny, eager way.
We drove past the Canal first--it is a wide, muddy, shallow ditch filled with weedy water. We drove past that ten-mile long sidewalk. It cannot be longer than a few hundred yards.We drove along "the long walk". The street corners came so fast that I hardly had time to look about me. What had happened? These were the grand, far reaches of the world when I was little!
We continued on to our street itself. But I had been back a few times before and I was prepared for the changes. The houses were the same--they still betrayed their inhabitants' peculiar flair for choosing frankly alarming colors of paint. The postage-stamp lawns were still unkempt and weedy. The trashcans were still rolled to the edge of the street.The hill is, in reality, a low roll of land--more olive colored than the summer's green I recall.
My crepe-myrtle tree--the one that bloomed in July and told me my birthday was near at hand before I had any knowledge of a calender--has been cut down. The bushes have grown up and the house, it seems, has grown down.
I felt like a giant as we rode through the neighborhood--as if I had grown much too large for the diminutive houses and narrow streets--as if any moment I might take a step in the wrong direction and crush one of the paste-board houses. It was all wrong. It was tiny and I was huge. I now towered over what had towered over me. Everything was turned upside-down and inside-out, and my house looked at me blindly as we crept past, almost reproachful in its new coat of ugly tan paint. I almost cried then--where was the dear, familiar, ivy-green that we had been so proud of helping Dad put on? But I refrained from those thoughts and we drove on.
But the most bittersweet part was driving past Doxey Park. I looked out at it in pure astonishment. It was not the park I knew--it couldn't be. And yet it is. The endless stretch of towering, looming, slightly dastardly oaks are, in reality, a patch no longer than an eighth of a mile. They are bare, at present, which made them all the more spindly and pale and sorry. The park accoutrements are gone. The trees seem to have shrunk with age--they are not grand--they are hardly presentable trees.
I could hardly bear to look upon the sight--it seemed a desecration to the dear places of my childhood, still so vivid in my memory. And then I saw it. I saw the one piece of all those disappointments that retained its honor, its glory, and redeemed all my disappointments in one fell swoop:
The lamp-post.
That one piece of it all that convinced us Narnia was real. That one bewitching, iron, mystery. How it got there were never wondered--it was there and that was enough. It stands there still, under those naked, bare trees. It is still black as pitch, it is still straight and tall. It is still an image of the wonder of childhood. I could almost have thrown my arms around its spare body and kissed it, I was so relieved. The bright pictures of my memories came flooding back. It is not pleasant, you know, to find your childhood haunts desecrated by the change of time.
I am still sitting here in denial, knowing that the grass
was greener, the woods
were deeper, the sky
was bluer in that little neighborhood when I was a little girl. But then I realized something: perhaps it was a child's simple love for the things around them that made me see the beauty in that little squash of suburbia. Perhaps it was a simple love and hope and excitement in the little things that added the color to the wilderness of pavement patched up with untidy grass. Perhaps it was the unbridled joy of a child that gave me a fierce love for the drab little place. I am glad I left before I grew any older and realized where I truly lived. I am glad the memories of Smoke Tree are brighter and more real in my mind than the reality--I would rather remember it as I saw it as a child.
And I think fondly of that steadfast lamp-post, that last portal into my childhood. I think fondly of it, taking a last stand in the lonesome, drab little park all by itself like a hearty little sentinel. I think of it with a aching in my heart and a lump in my throat and I must go off and speak with my Gentleman of those dear, bright days, for
he remembers. He remembers as I do, and it lessens the pain to speak of it.
And I hang on to a foolish, childish little fancy that the lamp-post, in its own way, remembers us too.
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