The tree in our front yard seemed incredibly high to a pair of fifth graders, but we climbed it every day after school anyway. My mom, a glass of iced tea with mint by herside, sat out front and chatted with her friends as she watched the daredevil girls scale ever higher. It was in that tree, in that yard, that I watched, helpless and horrified, when mypartner-in-crime fell all the way down and snapped the bone in her arm.
Her arm healed quickly and we played on. Beyond the tree a large swath of grass gave us plenty of room to run. On sweltering, humid summer nights we gathered our siblings and played monkey in the middle in that yard, until the street lights finally came on and our mothers called us home.
It was there, in that yard, that I watched sunflowers growas tall as my dad, by the side of the house. It was in those woods that my friends and I celebrated our inner explorers. We traipsed and tromped. We walked all the way through to the otherside. We played in the heaping piles of pebbles used for construction or landscaping or who knows what. Those piles were like snow mounds for kids in the south and for as much as we knew, they existed for our playing pleasure.
That yard was mine for six whole years, longer than anyother yard of my childhood. As the daughter of a Marine pilot, I found myself in a new home every three years but this time my dad was assigned back-to-back tours and so we stayed in Quantico, VA for six. I ended elementary school and began high school there. Big years.
After we moved I returned to Quantico occasionally, weaving my car in and out of the streets and memories of my childhood. Right there! That’s where I played under the streetlight with Jessica, that night I snuck out the window. (And got into big trouble with my parents later.) And—there! That’s the hill where I split my knee open when I tried to ride my bike with no hands. There—that’s the swimming pool where I morphed, before my own eyes, from a fun-loving kid who played Marco Polo with her brother to a self-conscious teen, worried about what the cool kids thought.
These days I live halfway across the country and I haven’t had the chance to return as often as I’d like. On a recent visit, though, we had some extra time and my mom drove me through the old neighborhood.
As we rounded the bend, my stomach dropped.
Gone were the woods where we ran through the creek and climbed tree houses and pretended we were Lewis and Clark. Gone were the yards and the duplexes and the trees. No morning glories. No sunflowers. Instead, shiny new townhouses rose in their place.
My childhood, I thought. What happened to my childhood?
The houses were old, I know. I found out later that more than 1,200 homes were demolished to make way for the new. The homes we lived in were outdated and quarters were tight. I’m sure the current servicemen and their families appreciate the fresh new townhouses with their Pottery Barn colors. I don’t begrudge them their new digs one bit. Life in the military is hard enough—no need to add housing trouble to the list.
But I am left alone with my memories, now. There’s nothing concrete to validate what I knew, what I know—nothing I can point to and say, There, that’s where it happened.
I wonder if there are other events that leave us with this feeling—this dangling in space. Have you been there?
