Walking the Wall

"I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable in itself–we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different" (The Historian, page 74)

When an errand took my nearby where I grew up, I felt that same longing to seek out that feeling of home that for so many years was my home when growing up. It was an odd feeling to drive down a road in a place that "looked" so much like the home of my memories, but felt like a strange place. It was like in the movie Artificial Intelligence when they completely reconstructed the little boy’s home from his memory–everything in it’s right place, but just not real. The playground behind our apartment was torn down and just a piece of concrete, but it just took a squint and I could see the swing I used to swing on while counting or singing because I can only swing if I count and sing otherwise I get nauseated. The bend in the road took me over a dip that flooded once when I was growing up and we all ran out to splash and "swim" in the water, I still have a scar on my leg where I got stabbed with a stick that I couldn’t see under the water. The streets were so quiet and there wasn’t a wonderful janitor who waltzed down the street with his broom and froze whenever he knew someone was watching; there weren’t two old ladies sitting in the chair ready to yell or call my mother if we swung too high or ran too fast or yelled too loudly; the garbage bins weren’t where they were when I got my first kiss behind the dumpster in second grade; the pool was gone where we swam in the summers and I got my Jr. Lifeguard card that I was so proud of–the same place, but different.

Still, after I took a picture of the apartment with my camera phone, I wandered across the street to look at one last place that meant so much to me, a memory that has stayed into adulthood, given wings to poems, and fostered a longtime love of trees. I rounded the bend of an apartment building, and there it was, still standing where I can close my eyes and see it standing and feel the bark against my cheek and hear the leaves rustling. My tree.  It was the perfect climbing tree and up in its secret spaces was a branch that had grown just for me, it fit me as if the tree had a memory of me and grew a branch that would perfectly accommodate me laying out my length on it, legs dangling, cheek to wood to drowse away summer days. My tree, my memory, still there.