Quiet still
by Cheryl, posted on August 26th, 2010 in Mama Kat's Writing Workshop
I grew up on top of a mountain.
Only it wasn’t really a mountain, despite the word being in the name of the street. It was a hill. It topped out at just over 800 feet, into a heavily wooded area that was criss-crossed by trails. If you walked back there, past the large metal gate that blocked car traffic from this bramble of a cul-de-sac, you could find the paths and, if you kept going, you’d come upon remnants of charred wood in a circle, empty beer bottles lying on their sides.
It was quiet. Always quiet except for the crunching of small twigs and the occasional distant whine of a dirt bike.
We were never scared. We could go behind my house, across our backyard and be swallowed by the woods. We’d tramp downhill for what seemed like miles. There was a tree fort someone had built – long before we moved in, maybe even before we were born – way high up. There was wood nailed into the side of the tree for a ladder and we’d climb up onto the rickety wood platform, never considering what time and elements could do to it. Our view was pretty much the same as it was from the ground: trees and the soft ground cover of brown dead leaves.
We lived exactly a mile and a tenth up from the bottom of our mountain/hill. There were kids in the neighborhood, which really wasn’t a neighborhood, it was just a street, winding and twisty with no neighbors behind, just endless woods.
There was a rock quarry half-way up. You either lived up-quarry or down-quarry. There were separate holiday parties. We thought we were better, of course, because we were higher up. But really? It had its problems. It was isolating. If the weather was bad, which, it being Connecticut, was anywhere from November through March, my mother refused to drive anywhere. She’d refuse even if Hilton Kaderli said on the 6 ‘o clock news that it might flurry the next day. While my friends who lived in other – flatter – parts of town used to go to the middle school on snow days to sled down the big hill next to it, we stayed home and shoveled and made snow forts.
The bus stop for junior high and high school was all the way at the bottom. The one from elementary school was half a mile down, at the quarry. Walking there wasn’t bad, but the uphill climb on the way home was tough for a seven year-old. Sometimes I’d have to walk home by myself if my brother had to stay after school for an activity. A few houses up from the stop was a yellow house. The Collins’. They had two Great Danes. Sometimes the dogs would get out and stand in the middle of the road and stare me down. I was frozen to the street in my top-siders. It was a good old fashioned stand-off. My only hope was my mother would finally realize I was very late, and I’d hear the faded red Buick station wagon roaring down the street like the calvary.
The house across the street had two older girls when we moved in. One was I think a little older than my sister, who had six years on me, and another who was a couple years older than me. One time I went to play Barbies over there with the younger girl and she smashed my new Superstar Ken doll against her tub and cracked his neck, knocking his head off. She laughed. I had to tape his head back on and he always had a big chunk missing from his neck. I wasn’t sad when they moved away.
The family next door had a son a year younger than me. We were friends until maybe junior high when it just got awkward. I’m not sure why. My parents’ bedroom looked down on their driveway and once I spied on them when they were playing basketball and I got totally busted. They saw me and I ducked down but the father didn’t think it was funny. He didn’t like us and my parents thought he was an anti-semite and I think for the last 10 years they lived there they didn’t speak at all.
In many ways I hated where we lived, especially as I got older. Even though I could steal Kent cigarrettes from the carton my father kept on the top of the refrigerator and sneak into the woods with my best friend and nobody would notice us smoking and pretending we were teenagers and cool. No one wanted to carpool for basketball practice (it was too far away and that hill!) and friends didn’t want to schlep all the way out there to pick me up for the movies or parties before I got my driver’s license.
I wanted to live where there were houses in front AND in back of us. I wanted a street where you could ride your bike around the block. Where neighbors were friendly and actually spoke to one another, where parents lingered on the driveway with a glass of wine and chatted and watched their kids on bikes. Where it wasn’t so, well, inconvenient.
Kind of like the place where my own kids are growing up.
The picture is of my house, and yet it’s not MY house. I got the shot from Google maps. When we lived there our house was dark brown and there were trees in the middle of the front yard that were perfectly spaced for whiffle ball bases. There were bushes lining the large front windows – out of which our dog leapt to chase a squirrel on our move-in day. The squirrels were always so fat.
The house in the picture looks smaller somehow. The street doesn’t seem quite so steep. But it still looks quiet outside, doesn’t it? It still looks quiet.
This post was based on the prompt “Your childhood neighborhood” from Mama Kat’s writers workshop.
Tags: it was so quiet, lots of woods, superstar ken, that's my old house, tree forts, whiffle ball, would never let my kids wander the woods and walk alone from the bus stop
Betsy Says:
cristina Says:
Janine Says:
)
That, and I hadn’t actually lived anywhere else that I really remembered, so there was really nothing to compare it to.
Jennifer Says:
Kris Says:
Cheryl Reply:
August 26th, 2010 at 9:49 am
Is it because you wanted to steal cigarrettes?
[Reply]