Geography of Childhood

 

We grow up getting our bearings in the universe by internalizing the geography of a pattern formed by a certain tree outside our kitchen window, a large rock embedded in the hillside, a bend in the bay, a bit of sparse grass between two buildings.  If, as we grow older, we have to leave our home for an extended period of time, we take this internalized geography along with us.

James Finley, The Contemplative Heart

 

When I was young, I lived in a small two-family house at 36 Charles River Road in Watertown Massachusetts.  My grandmother Phillipia and grandfather Nunzio lived upstairs with my aunt Nancy.  I lived downstairs with my mother Carmela and my father Michael.  Our apartments were connected by stairs running up the back of the house that we used as if we lived in one house.  We shared groceries and meals, tv and laundry, backyard chores and snow shoveling. Our clothes hung together on the line that ran from the upstairs kitchen window to the garage.  We ate the sweet bosc pears from the tree Nunzio had planted in the backyard before I was born and my mother was still a child. The mint ran wild.

 

My best friends Diane and Pammy lived next store.  We would climb over the white picket fence between our yards to play.  We lived across the road from the Charles River which runs into Boston Bay and was a main travel way for the Wampanoags and early settlers.  It was our favorite placed to play.  There was a playground with swings, monkey bars, and a long metal slide that burned your legs in summer, a hill to sled down in winter, a long rope swing from the tallest of oaks.  We made a playhouse in the uparching roots of a hillside birch tree exposed from washed out soil.  I felt so free being able to go to the park with playmates unattended by grownups.  That playground only a quarter mile from the house felt a world away as if I were in another county.  Although I didn’t realize it then, I think the feeling of freedom at being able to wander so far from home and in the wilds of the park came from a knowing that my grandmother or mother would be at the house when I returned.

 

My mother still lives near that house – the one she grew-up in and then raised me in.  I often walk by the house, the river, and the park after I visit her.  Each time I do, the tender carefree feeling of childhood fills my heart.  I experience the years folding in on themselves, my childhood self at play again in those fields as I walk by.  I see myself riding my bike fast on the path, running through the cold water sprinkler on a hot day, sliding down the dirt hill from the tree fort into the river.  My grandmother is in the upstairs kitchen cutting tomatoes for dinner.  My father is bringing in the groceries.  Nunzio is out in the shed making a new tool to clean the inside of an eggplant.  My mother is there too, her hair deep brown again, her mind clear, smoking a cigarette as she picks up a shirt that has fallen from the clothesline.