childhood and its idylls
While I know many people whose upbringing was far more rural than mine, I often remember that childhood when and where I grew up was a little more feral than kids these days (both in suburbs and cities.) My very city-raised husband and I were watching something where a child was perched in a tree and I said something about my favorite climbing tree, to which he admitted he had never in his life been up in a tree (nor felt any reason to do so.) Considering my favorite past time, from around age 9-14 had been to perch myself in the crotch of or under the apple tree at the corner of the yard, I was a little surprised he'd missed this sort of fun.
Mind you, it was definitely only 3-4 feet up a climb at any point, nothing that would have given my mother anxiety. An apple tree that had lots of crooks and nooks and had been there forever. The main branches at the bottom were sturdy and twisted around each other. The apples it produced were terrible..green and overly sour/bitter. Most fell from the tree and rotted underneath on the ground. We would just sit in the tree or under the tree, having makeshift picnics with popcorn and juice boxes. Playing with dolls, or when I was older, just reading. This spot, and several others on the rambling property that included our house and two other family homes. Once a year, it would be treacherous with wasps and rotting fruit, but was quite idyllic the rest of the time.
My parents still lived in a trailer when I was born. Actually had to move from one park to another when I was born from a non-kid friendly community to one with families. The memories of this house are fuzzier and mostly inside. Later, we moved to a residential street in Loves Park, just north of Rockford, where we remained until my parents built a house when I was 10 on the land my grandmother left them. The Loves Park house was small, but had a sizeable yard, including another huge tree, which Google maps shows is still standing, at the corner of the yard, having gown immense on the past few decades. In the back, we kept a swing set , though behind the garage was a giant empty oil barrel we liked to hang out on, mostly since it was out of sight from the house proper.
When we moved, the land was outside town and still pretty much is. While there were other houses on the single road that snaked down to the river, they were largely separated by space or foliage. There were farmers up near the end of the street and horses outside my bedroom window for most of my life. Deer regularly wandered through the yard, along with an assortment of other smaller animals like foxes and racoons. We would walk or ride our bikes down near the river, though it was a steep climb. When I was 13 o 14, I and a friend down the street, would occasionally climb up underneath the interstate bridge that spanned the river and listen to the trucks roll over us. Because it was the late 80s/early 90s no one really kept track of what we were doing or where we were going. It was sort of glorious. It's another thing J missed out, being 12 years younger and raised in much more observed times.
Granted, most of what we got up to was probably very unsafe. But then again, it forced you to make grown-up decisions early, which probably made you more resilient and mature in the long run. I wouldn't trade my childhood for anything, those days propped up in the tree, how the apples smelled. Or other things like trying to pick berries from the thicket without getting scratched, or rescuing Concord grapes from the back fence while fending off spiders. Those brown fuzzy caterpillars that made your hands itch. The lighting bugs we gathered in jars. I imagine most of these things are gone now, except maybe the caterpillars. When they cleaned out the yard, from the photos on Zillow, the berry bushes are no where to be found. The apple tree was ripped out when I was in high school to make room for my cousins' new house. The trees that were saplings when we first moved in, two of them had fallen from rot. My grandmother's lilac bushes had long ago been torn out along the side of what once had been her yard. My dad's evergreens at the front have grown higher, but much about the yard otherwise has been cleared out and flattened save a couple stray bushes near the garage. The history of the land changes over time I suppose, each new person who inhabits it, adding and subtracting from the flora and fauna.
Not that the city doesn't have its botanical and animal charms. There are the magnolias near the catholic school, of course, my barometer for springtime, though I almost missed their full glory this year. While I lost my regular lilacs in Grant Park across from the library, which on late May/early June days I specifically went out of my way to walk past, there are a couple on the street near J's mom's place that will suffice for my sniffing. While there are a lot of rats you catch sight of occasionally running under cars or in the alley, there are also a large and abundant number of rabbits in the neighborhood, and while I've yet to see a coyote this far north along the lakefront (I've seen most down around the harbors at Diversey and Belmont), they are likely still around A friend has seen them often in the cemeteries along with the smaller animals they no doubt hunt there.
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