The apple tree was an in-edible one..and sprouted these terribly sour golf ball sized fruits that mostly all wound up on the ground, rotting, and eaten out by worms every late summer/early fall. But the tree itself boasted exactly the right shape for climbing--not too high or dangerously, but the perfect spread to lodge oneself amongst the branches about 4 feet from the ground comfortably for hours. I spent a lot of time here, with other kids (my sister and cousins), but moreso alone with a book or notebook. When I was still young enough to play with dolls (mostly Cabbage Patches, but some others that approximated real infants) we would take our faux children to picnic under the tree with sandwiches and popcorn and koolaid that inevitably attracted ants. Most of my doll playing (and this included Barbie) included dressing them and styling their hair, which was about at motherly as I ever got. But I would alone take books out there and stay for hours by myself.
Later, the tree would come down when the new house was built, and it's crappy little apples fell no more. By then, I was a teenager and less interested in doll picnics. But solitary spaces remained important. At one point, there was an area behind my dad's shed, just outta site from the house, where I an my sister had erected the closest thing we ever had to playhouse with plywood and carpet scraps. the walls kept falling over and it was overrun with brown woolly caterpillars. Eventually, the rain rotted out the carpet and it was no more.
At our previous house, there was an enormous rusty oil barrel left by previous owners behind the garage, again the only place in the yard not visible from the windows, and we spent a lot of time perching ourselves on it's rusty surface. There was a tree in the front corner of the yard, that had low hanging branches that almost bowed back to the ground and made a good private spot. In that house, I had secured my first bedroom that was only mine, a sloped ceiling orange carpet squared garret that most of the time I was afraid to sleep in after years of bunk-bedding with my sister. . In the new house these was the basement, mostly empty for awhile and concrete walled, where we outfitted a faux living room with old furniture we'd moved with us and a giant counsel stereo turntable my mother should have gotten rid of (becuase I am pretty sure it's so big it will stay there forever.) We spent a good portion of childhood roller skating on the concrete floors and listening to its radio.
The important thing, was that these were child-only spaces, and I continued to seek them out, even after I had my own room. The snow forts we would make in the drifts where you had to crawl through tunnels to get to the main living area. The spaces at the bottom of the road that led to the river. (from about 10 onward, we were given pretty much free reign of the neighborhood as long as we weren't alone.) The grassy little nook that tucked in under the overpass we crawled into as teenagers. There was a lot of exploring that isn't possible as a child now.) All of the forts we would build with blankets and oddly placed pieces of furniture. The roots of this desire for singular spaces probably goes way back. I have vague recollections of being 3-4 and my mother placing a sheet over the coffee table, where I would spend hours, my head peeking out just enough to see the t.v. I would take my coloring books and magic slates into my little oasis until my father came home later in the evening and took over the single television.
I think this is probably why, as an adult, I've lived predominantly alone in spaces that were distinctly mine...
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