Nostalgia Lane

Yesterday I took a drive down nostalgia lane. Literally. I had to attend a wake near my home town. Actually I grew up in three different towns, but they were right next to each other. I took my daughter on a tour of places I lived and places that were memorable to me many moons ago.

The house I grew up in as a young child, until age eight, is by far the one I remember the most and would like to forget just as much. Sitting in front of it, I answered my daughter's questions about living there, while inside my thoughts, memories and feelings were reeling. Before I even looked at my house I looked at the neighbor's. THE neighbor's house. An overgrown tree prevented me from seeing the window that would eventually be the distraction that saved me.

I remembered the yard so much bigger than it was, the distance to my house seeming an eternity. I thought back to how I wondered why someone would let me go there unsupervised at such a young age, just turned five. Why the police would take me to a neighbors house up the street to speak to me when it was over. Why so far away? I now realize my going there was undetected because their back door was truly only twenty feet from my house. And taking me to the neighbors porch for questioning was simply to get me as far from that house as possible while they took him into custody. I still have no idea why it took them so long to find me.

I found it difficult to find happy memories from that street. In the few minutes I was there, I racked my brain for a time when I smiled, laughed, felt loved. I came up empty. A word that completely describes my childhood there. A time in my life that I was too young to control my surroundings. A time when I was unable to create my own reality, to rebel, to run away mentally.

I left that house in third grade. I was eight. I had a snow fort in the yard that winter. It was still standing as we prepared to leave for the final time. I hugged it. My snow fort. The only hug I truly gave all year. The only attachment to the first eight years of my life.