Tag Archives: childhood

Why that road?

My husband pointed out the other day that I’ve now lived in Rio de Janeiro for longer than I’ve lived in any other town in my life. Thirteen years! Eleven of them in the same apartment. The first two years we didn’t realize we were staying, so we just rented some temporary places notable mostly for various weirdnesses. But not enough time has passed to detail that!

Nevertheless, this came to mind the other morning when I dreamed I was visiting a house in the town I lived in for a good part of my childhood (but only 10 years!) — Yellow Springs, Ohio. I can’t recall a dream in which I was in my college hometown (Bloomington, Indiana) or in Manhattan or Hoboken or, for that matter, Madrid or Chicago or Wanfried-an-der-Lahn, or dozens of other places I’ve visited over the years. Any time I dream vividly of a recognizable place, it’s either Yellow Springs or Sharon, Connecticut.

So here I was, not for the first time, dreaming that I was visiting the old house on Hyde Road where a childhood friend had lived. In dreams set in Yellow Springs the most common locations are Hyde Road or the Glen. I suspect Hyde Road was particularly memorable because it had, in the 1970s, many horses pastured along the roadside, and I would ride my bike down there as often as I could just to see the horses.

My friend’s old house on that road was striking for various reasons. Most other people’s houses were interesting, if only because at the age of 8 or 10 I was now visiting other kids in their homes more often, and for the first time really getting to know the details of how other families lived. One had the coolest squishy linoleum in the hallway, which would hold the imprint of your fingernail if you pressed it. (An activity forbidden as soon as it was discovered by the mother!) Another had a tree house and a strange structure called a carport. It was the only house with a carport I had ever seen; the rest had garages. And this old house on Hyde Road had a bunch of strange features that I remember vividly to this day. One was an enormous brindled dog that I mistook for a tiger on my first visit. Another was a little ‘house’ down from the back door where milk and butter had once been stored in the cold waters of a spring that flowed there. And most fascinating was a secret room, hidden below a large trapdoor in the living room floor, which was in turn hidden by an oriental rug (in my memory, at least). I was told it had been used to shelter people escaping slavery, since the town had been founded by Quakers, who were active in opposing slavery and helping those escaping across the Ohio River to freedom in the North.

So here I was again, as an adult in this dream, going down this same road, and seeing that there was a house-tour event going on. So I wandered up to the house and asked if I could take part in the tour. I no longer recall what happened after that. It was a visually vivid dream, but not otherwise very interesting.

When dreams are set in Sharon, CT the landscape tends to be the main feature – usually I am traversing the neighboring farm fields for some urgent reason or another; or I’m addressing problems in the gully or wooded hillside beside the little cottage we once lived in; these problems usually require traversing the neighboring fields to get the help of the neighbors. I don’t recall anything particularly memorable at the moment. It’s again the visual impact, the clarity of memory of those landscapes, that sticks in my head the most.

Both places had horses in common.

I don’t have any photos of Yellow Springs, but one can find it on google. Of the landscapes around Sharon. My favorite sort: rolling farmland.

The warriors and the gecko

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Since the quarantine I’d begun exercising outdoors, in a shared space around the apartment building. It hosts a steady stream of adults exercising, but at tide-like intervals all the young children stream out of the apartments to play together. In particular there is a herd of five boys, the oldest on a bicycle, the next three on scooters, and the youngest running along on foot. Several carry plastic swords. The runner carries some sort of elaborate space weapon that is nearly as tall as he is. Their game is unclear, but involves running back and forth the full length of the space (a good 100 meters end to end, I’d think). They pause at each end, sometimes dropping their scooters and bike and plunking down cross-legged on the pavement to discuss some Very Important Subject. Most delightful are their encounters with wildlife.

One day the oldest came running up to me with his hands cupped. “Do you want a gecko?” he asked. I didn’t understand, but enthusiastically asked to see what he had. He opened his hands to reveal a very tiny and unmoving gecko, minus half of its tail. “Is it still alive?” I asked. “Well, yes, but it’s rather suffering,” he replied with a certain delicacy. “You see, we tried to pick it up by the tail, but it broke off. And then we picked it up regular-like, but I think it’s afraid and tired.” “It probably would like to rest in the woods,” I suggested. “Just let me show my mom, then you can put him in the woods,” he agreed. He dashed off, followed by the rest of the herd, shouting for his mother.

After a bit he and his friends came stampeding back and graciously handed over the traumatized gecko. I was about to set him on top of the wall along the woods, but the boy suggested that in the woods a snake might eat him. I agreed this was possible, and instead laid the creature under some branches in a large flower box where he would be shaded from the sun and out of sight of birds.

There is a certain awe these boys hold for the natural world that cuts through their shouting battles and sword-waving charges. In an instant they stop and stand fascinated, watching a lizard, a monkey, or a caterpillar.

That fascination and engagement reminded me of the wondrous quality my childhood play spaces had when I was that age. An overgrown lot at the end of a suburban street seemed as vast and engaging as a wild prairie. A small mound of dirt, abandoned after some unfinished construction project, offered a challenging ascent and high view. The branches regularly trimmed from the neighbor’s very tall hedge made a cozy lean-to that lasted until the next lawn-mowing day.

The memories of these places are vivid still, more than 45 years later, more so than many other memories. It’s a delight to watch these kids experiencing something similar.

So excited!

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When I checked on the melon sprouts today, and found them nearly twice the size as yesterday, I felt a surge of delight. I remembered then a similar delight as a kid when my very own watermelon seeds sprouted in a little spot by the fence, near the grown-up vegetable garden. I must have gone every day to check on them, just as I am now. I’m already planning how to hang string on the patio railing to give them something to climb.

My only clear memory of the watermelon plants from childhood is that each morning when a tiny watermelon was discovered I would pick it and run inside to show my mom. So there were never any edible melons produced. This time I’ll just take pictures and blog about it. Which is still a way of showing my mom!

The fascinating world of laundromats

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I have an assortment of vivid memories from laundromats. The earliest is of the slatted frosted glass windows at the laundry my mom used when I was about five years old. The window slats tilted back and forth to open, like a Venetian blind. The half-obscured oblong glimpses of the parking lot and road in front of the building remains in my memory. I, like many kids that age, loved to kneel on a seat and look over the back of it, rather than sit in it and look frontwards. It was at that same laundry that I remember learning to fold sheets with my mom. This is a nice dance when done with another person, giggles when one of you turns your end upside down. In my adult life, though, I usually fold sheets alone, and use the “fold, fold, fold….arg…roll the darn thing up and stuff it in the closet” method.

The next memorable laundromat had that lovely hot-clothes smell and two intriguing ‘bullet holes’ in one of the large windows. I don’t know if they were actually made by a BB gun, or a pebble tossed up by a passing car, but our town was far too small to have a ‘rough side’ and people rarely if never rode around shooting out their car windows in any case, so it seems unlikely that the two dings in the big window were caused by any real drama.

I was older now, perhaps in junior high, and memories of the laundry are accompanied by a vague irritable stress. The Tastee Freez was right across the street, which provided excuses to go get nasty industrialized snack products. I also remember using the wringer once in a while, though probably just to entertain myself. And I remember one amazing day where I went to change dollars for dimes at the machine in the corner, and instead of regular dimes, the machine discharged antique real silver Liberty Head dimes. I knew my coins from my dad, who liked to stash bags of silver coins in the garden in case of Zombie Apocalypse. I begged my mom for more dollars, making change until no more silver dimes came out. I remember ending up with a good 50 or so of the precious coins, plus enough regular dimes to finish drying the clothes.

Quarantine these days features the washing of enormous amounts of laundry, mostly because we are washing things more frequently than usual, and because being at home all day I am washing things that normally don’t get washed often, like cotton blankets, throw rugs, and the covers from the sofa pillows. Here in Brazil there is no dryer, just racks suspended from the ceiling near a breezy window, and the warm dry sunny climate to turn out load after load of fresh clothes. We hang gym clothes and towels directly in the sun to dry, to get that extra sanitizing effect. The rest dry well enough in the laundry room.

My mom has always kept me up to date on her laundry – she gets to hang it on a real line in a sunny yard, which is cozy and nostalgic. I would do the same in a minute if I had a place. The laundry is like a living creature then, like fire in a fireplace. It becomes a member of the household.

Diptheria, Measles and TB! Oh my!

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My mother recalled the quarantines of her own youth:

She remembered having diptheria when she was about 3 years old and an official coming and tacking a pink quarantine sign on the front door. She couldn’t go out of the house but she didn’t remember it affecting anyone else.

She remembered that when she had measles it was important to keep the blinds shut, as there was a danger of blindness. She recalls being sick in bed and the first steam shovel was rolling down the road to a new mine, and she was so excited to see this novelty, but her mother only let her watch for a moment, because it was not good to allow light to hit her eyes.

She remembered that her brother had gone to a TB sanitarium when he was six years old and he was there for a year. This had happened before she was born, but she saw pictures of him from that time, and remembered how forlorn he looked.

She remembered that a girl she knew in high school was sent to a sanitarium for a year, too, and eventually recovered. She heard that a couple of her mother’s brothers died from TB, and another was sent away to a sanitarium, but being already an adult at the time he moved on from there after he recovered and never returned home.

When she was in grade school she remembered an itinerant family arriving in town for a while, and their three children came to school and had lice, and had to hang their coats on hooks away from the other children’s coats. She remembered getting lice once and her aunt washing her hair with kerosene in the laundry sink to get rid of them. And she remembered a lot of kids having ringworm, and having a bandage on their heads for this reason. She said they didn’t tease the kids with ringworm, but knew to stay away from them until it was cured, as it is highly contagious.