This is her first post here, but certainly not her last! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did for it is great! Read on Dear Readers, read on!Frankly, I don’t have time to write this… I can’t afford the emotional, psychic energy or the time but then doesn’t all of life require these… Is there not benefit, even healing in traveling and acknowledging that travelling down memory lane?
I’ve taken up biking. Oh, I’ll be no Lance or shall I say Lancet Armstrong but in my mid-age crisis I’ve decided on this activity as a way to connect with my youth while attempting to extend it…one mile at a time, as it were.
Today I biked through Wampatuck State Park. Yes, through it, to the neighboring town only accessible to vehicles thin enough to pass through the gate. The gateway was more than a divide between towns for me today. In fact it became a time portal and the dividing line between the town in which all five of my siblings grew up and the town where the arrival of the owner of this blog and our younger sister made our house far too small.
Trying to get a few extra miles in before the rain arrived I found myself rather unintentionally in the playground of the elementary school where I attended 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades. Of course, the building was smaller than I remembered but the window into my third grade classroom was still there. I saw myself, a seven year old, having been sent outside during science class on an adventure in full view of the class. I, with wet finger, would show the entire class how to tell which way the wind was blowing. I saw the playground where I came to my little brother’s rescue during recess from the strange behavior of one mainstreamed less then intellectually endowed bully. I saw the now overgrown playground where we played Capture the Flag with the “big kids” at summer camp. The parking lot—immortalized in beloved low tech home movies--where my Dad and my “Pa” took my brothers and me on a Sunday to fly planes-- is now a grassy playground with new and “safe” equipment. Gone are the metal and HOT slides and jungle gyms and the tetherball post.
How brave my parents were to let my brother and I ride our bikes one day to school for field day on these narrow rural roads. They seem narrow even to me now. I am back through Wampatuck to my current side of life and while not a mite younger, I like to think a tad bit wiser. And I wonder if it is youth or wisdom than noticed the lone blooming and tiny flower-- a shade of red / pink / fushia too beautiful for human words-- along that narrow road…
2 comments:
I love that your Sister was your guest host today! How fun, and what a "trip" it is to go and revisit the places of your childhood. I find myself doing that a lot since our move back to Oregon.
That auntie rocks!!!!!
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