We have neighbor friends who ask us to keep an eye on their house when they’re out of town, and sometimes we take care of their dog Griz. Recently Griz and I went on a short walk in our neighborhood. We came across four young kids playing near the base of a large silver maple tree on the edge of the park and school playground. I couldn’t make out what they were doing at first, but as we got closer it was clear two of them were building something, while the other two gathered items nearby, like sticks and rocks. I heard one of the girls mention forts, shelters and place. It was warm with a slight breeze and Griz was sniffing every tree, pole and the one red fire hydrant. It’s as if he didn’t even notice the kids around him. The area was filled with the distant voices of other kids too and the faint smell of spring and early lilacs. It’s a familiar aroma from childhood and their activity was as well. When we walked by, there wasn’t more than a small hole with a few branches poked into the ground around it, a pile of sticks and small rocks to be incorporated into whatever they were making.
It flushed out memories that filled me up and it suddenly felt like I was in the field at the end of the street from where I grew up. The field continued endlessly into more fields, then wheat, bluffs, coulees, river flats and eventually into the arid mountains thirty miles away. The area we spent the most time in closest to Ferguson Drive, is now called Grande Vista Park. It has a playground, baseball diamonds, dugouts, chain link fences, a small building with bathrooms, parking, and a cluster of houses beyond all of it. In the nineteen-sixties it was empty and felt a little wild. It was endless, but it wasn't wild, or remote. The wildness was in our heads. Its remoteness was in our heads. If a neighbor across the street looked out their windows, or were mowing their lawn, or washing their car in the driveway, they could have seen us organizing, planning and digging nearby. What we were doing and where we were doing it wouldn't have seemed unusual to them, but to us it was magical. We were inventing a world. Thinking back, the partially buried structure we worked on and what it represented wasn't about the result, it was about our ideas and the adventure we felt.
Eventually in the distance someone’s parents would call out for one of us to come home for dinner. We all perked up knowing another parent would probably be calling out soon too and we were ready because we were tired and hungry. We'd been gone since lunch. We left most of what we'd gathered for our project next to the small trench we dug intending to return and continue our work. The only item we took with us was the shovel we'd borrowed from someone's garage. We dispersed towards our separate houses for the night and when I walked through my backdoor my mom discretely accessed my level of dirt to determine what I might track in.
Griz and I continued to walk through the thick scent of blossoms and beyond the four kids busy building their place, devoted to it, maybe even dreaming of a castle on a rock. As much as they were physically creating something, it mostly swirled in their heads. They described it out loud to each other under their giant maple tree, just like we did in our field of dust.
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“Memory is a wild and private place.” Margaret Wise Brown — author of Goodnight Moon
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Songs :: Border Song by Elton John, Out In the Country by Three Dog Night, Time Waited by My Morning Jacket, Time In A Bottle by Jim Croce, After The Gold Rush by Neil Young, and Blue Horizon by Graham Parker
© C. Davidson