Every Monday, I recall a standout moment from my childhood/adolescence to the best of my ability. To read other memories, click here.
If you stand on the street corner where my neighborhood begins, you can see clear through two yards into our kitchen windows. It wasn’t always this way.
Several acres of woods once separated the backyards of the houses on my street from a busy main road. Yellow hunting notices dappled the trees whenever my friends and I ventured back there, ever hopeful that one day we might see a deer up close. While the telltale munched plants and piles of droppings in our yards indicated that they had been there, we only came as near as our parents’ cars would go on moonlit roads before slamming the breaks to avoid hitting them as they dawdled in the streets.
I never feared for what might be lurking in the brush because I had been roaming around back there for as long as I could remember, hauling barrels of grass clippings down the hillside or trying to crawl into the space under the deck. Playing there never got old because we could never run out of games to make up or explorations to embark upon.
The woods were my sanctuary where I could be as weird as I wanted to be, free of judgment. I donned my dad’s safety goggles and screamed and meted out my frustrations by shattering empty glass bottles against the rocks (it was mom’s idea, and I always picked up the pieces). I passed hours scrambling over abandoned pipes and construction materials, behemoths I viewed as ancient artifacts. Playing in the woods was the best part of living in the neighborhood.
The bulldozers showed up some time around the turn of the century, knocking out the trees first so the sloping land could be razed to the ground. Sparse bushes remained around a massive heap of soil that we continued to scale as though it were a miniature mountain. Lush woods were reduced to an ugly patch of dirt. The quiet serenity of my backyard was gone, fed to the beast that was the street beyond.
“For sale” signs appeared out back, but the new lots looked so awful it was no wonder that nobody purchased them for nearly five years. I’d angrily ask my parents why the township bothered to destroy our woods to free up space for houses that nobody wanted. There were other miniature forests in the neighborhood, but none like the one behind our home.
People bought the lots eventually, and the houses they built were nice enough. The family who moved in directly behind us had to install a retaining wall to hold up the hillside that abruptly dropped off into what became their backyard. Excluding their yards, the surrounding land remained a mess. Prickly shrubs dot the uneven terrain. Piles of bricks and crates are stacked off to the side, construction equipment too small and unstable for even a child to play on.
The property values went down. New neighbors moved into the house next door to ours and cut down several trees for no apparent reason. The tall bushes that separated our lawn from the neighbors on the other side started to die until those, too, had to be cut down. I began turning off my car stereo as soon as I rounded the corner into our plan, not wanting to contribute to the teenager-induced noise pollution we were suddenly slapped with.
Everything seemed so much more exposed.
