"Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to spots where they happened." ~Siri Hustvedt

Earlier this week, I drove to my hometown to babysit one of my grandchildren who moved there with his parents recently. It was a brisk morning, and I bundled Noah up, put him in his stroller, leashed up little Brinkley, and headed out for a morning walk. I've done this a few times now with Noah, but it's not a strange or new neighborhood to me. The familiarity of those particular asphalt streets, the hills and curves they form, the nearby park, the houses we passed, the smell of fallen leaves - all of that felt as intimate to me as my own skin, bringing to mind a flood of childhood memories.

My growing up buddies - Traci, Donna, Kim, & Kevin

In March of 1967, when I was one-year-old and my brother was three, my parents bought a brand new home in a new development.  As the neighborhood grew, the homes filled up with other families like ours - young couples with children our ages.  Some families came and went, leaving me with only fleeting memories. But others, like us, stayed for the duration of our childhoods. 

Clinton Street was a great place to grow up. Our block, along with the parallel street (Buckner) and the shorter, perpendicular street which connected the two (Hale), was separated from the larger part of the neighborhood by a busy two-lane road. This isolated us until we reached the age when our parents felt like we were old enough to cross the busier road. For me, that freedom came incrementally, first being allowed only as far as the Werner's mailbox (three houses down), then to the end of the street, before finally getting old enough to cross the chasm of that busy, dangerous road. I don't remember how old I was before I reached that pinnacle, but at least into my double-digits. Because of these physical limitations, our Clinton/Hale/Buckner gang were a close knit bunch.

I've been back many times since leaving home. But never like this - pushing my grandchild's stroller  down the same streets where I used to play . . . in HIS neighborhood. As we walked, I told Noah about the houses I remembered. The red brick house, where our friends Mark and Traci lived. Theirs was the "cool house" in the neighborhood - the only one with a trampoline, cable TV, a pool table, AND a swimming pool! Traci had a a dachshund named Mandy who celebrated birthdays with parties. My dog, Tramp, was always invited. 

 As Noah and I progressed down the street, I told him about the other families - I knew the names of everyone who lived on our street back then. Mrs. Werner (remember - the mailbox three doors down) was my first piano teacher.  The family next door to us had four children, and their oldest, Kim, was my first and best friend. I remember during my preschool years watching Captain Kangaroo and Sesame Street each morning, then asking my mother if I could go ring Kim's doorbell and ask her mother if she could come over to my house to play. We played a lot - inside both of our houses, and outside as well. The small ditch between our houses served as a perfect river for our Barbie boats after a heavy rain. 

Kim, Traci, and I would often go up in the "woods" behind our houses, climbing the "red dirt hill," and exploring the trails back there. One time we found an injured rabbit. We named him Brer Rabbit, and Traci took him home with her to nurse him back to health. (We knew her parents were the most likely to let her keep him.) Unfortunately, Brer Rabbit didn't make it, so we took him back to the woods to carefully bury him, complete with a tearful funeral. 

Then, there were the kids from "around the block," on Buckner. These were mostly my brother's buddies - Karl, Steve, Lee, and Bubba. They played a lot of "street league football," built bike ramps like Evel Knievel, and lots of other dangerous things that boys do. One of them (you know who you are) was the "Eddie Haskell" of the neighborhood - he tended to pick on us younger ones, but was always very polite and respectful to adults. I can still hear him saying, "Hello, Mrs. Meadows, how are you?" to my mother, all while planning his next prank for later the same day.  

The neighborhood park was on the restricted side of the large road, so I didn't venture there without my parents until I was older.  But I remember riding bikes as a family and going there to play sometimes in the long summer evenings. (Yes, even my mother rode a bike back then.) The walking trail that is accessed by the same street where the park is was frequently the site of walks I would take with my daddy - he helped me collect leaf samples there when I was in Mrs. Strohsahl's high school Biology class, and one of my favorite memories of him was the time it snowed and we walked down there together, just the two of us, in the quiet of a winter wonderland.  My own children played in that same park when they would visit my parents as children. They also played in the same back yard where Kim and I transformed my daddy's rock garden into a mountain range for our Barbies, and his fish pond into a lake. 

And now, my grandchild lives in that same neighborhood, a short mile from where I lived when I was his age. I remember riding my ten-speed powder blue bike down the street where he lives on a regular basis when I was old enough to cross that wide, dangerous road. If twelve-year-old Tracy could have seen into the future, she would have been blown away by that!

Most of the houses in that neighborhood have different residents now. And most of the parents of the kids I grew up with have passed from this life. But they all live in my memory as I walk those streets once again. I can see them all in my mind's eye, even down to the vehicles they drove.

And it makes me wonder about Noah . . . will he come back here in 50 years, push his grandchild down these same streets, and talk about the memories he has of growing up here? I hope he has the same kinds of fun that I did, even though so much has changed in our world since then. Sadly, I can't imagine letting children go off into the woods alone these days, or even having the run of the neighborhood the way we did back then.  But I hope he has friends down the street, and plays freeze tag with them in the summer until it gets dark. And I hope he remembers walks with his Mimi down to his great-grandma's house, listening to me ramble about bottle rocket wars we had in the middle of the street, and the time that one of the neighborhood boys pulled up the entire brick sidewalk my daddy had built looking for roly polies. (Don't ever do that, Noah.) Kristen Hannah wrote, "Home is part of us. It's in the scars we have on our knees and elbows, in the memories that surface when we sleep. I don't think you can ever really leave." I felt that profoundly this week.