Prompt Week Six: You haven't been there since you were little, now you go back....

             Until I was nine I lived with my grandparents in a large white house at the end of a dead-end street in Hampden, Maine. The house sat atop a steep hill, far away from the road. At some point my grandfather got the dirt driveway paved and it was a smooth, sleek black tar. At the top of the hill the driveway opened into a huge flat playground for hopscotch and games of HORSE. There was a basketball hoop mantled to the white garage and behind the two red metal doors there were hula hoops, jump ropes, and my blue plastic pool. To the left of the garage there was a picnic table, its red paint chipped with age. Here, I spent days reading about the adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her life on the prairie.

Like many young children I played make-believe and during the lazy days of summer I reenacted my version of prairie life. The house provided the perfect, natural backdrop for my fantasy. Large pine trees offered the house shade at the height of the afternoon sun and in the summer lilac trees blossomed in pink, purple, and white. My grandmother had a garden; it was filled with fresh green beans, potatoes, tomatoes, turnip, and pumpkin. Literally any vegetable you wanted, she grew it.  I helped her in the garden, weeding and watering the plants, though I mostly chattered along her side as I snapped the ends of crisp green beans and popped them into my mouth. In the dewy morning, deer often grazed in the backyard as birds flocked to my grandmother’s birdfeeder. One spring morning, a doe and her fawns darted through the backyard on their way back into the woods. My grandmother’s husky often went hunting for “presents” for us and routinely dropped the poor, limp bodies of moles on the doorstep. We would find her sitting proudly next to her gifts, her blue eyes glowing, eager for praise.  

My favorite place was behind the garage. There was a narrow dirt path, overgrown with prickly weeds and shrubbery. Back here, the only sounds were the melody of waves crashing up on the shore of the Penobscot River and the upbeat songs of the birds. Behind the garage, squirrels freely ran up and down trees, playing a never-ending game of tag. Monarch butterflies flapped their bright wings and stopped to balance on crisp leaves; at night it wasn’t uncommon to see the flickering lights of hundreds of fireflies dancing through the air. There was also a rhubarb patch; it grew magically every year and every year I stumbled down the path to pick some so my grandmother could make her strawberry rhubarb pie. It was hands down my favorite thing to eat in the world, the perfect combination of bitter and sweet.

Three years ago my friend Meaghan and I hopped in her silver Honda for a Sunday afternoon drive to Belfast to grab a nice lunch and do some window shopping. It was early spring, the first warm afternoon of the year and we couldn’t wait to roll the windows down and breathe in the fresh air. We drove east, away from the dirty, familiar streets of Bangor and into Hampden, the town that houses my childhood memories. “Turn right up here,” I said as we drove up a hill towards the center of town.

“Where are we going,” she asked.

“This is the street I grew up on,” I replied. “The last house on the right.”

Meaghan slowly drove her tiny car down the road. She parked in front of my old house. It still sat atop a hill, though the hill wasn’t nearly as steep as I remembered and I wondered why I had been so scared as a child to sled down it. The red shutters were gone; the new owners had opted for neutral beige and as I looked at the looming pine trees in the front yard my childhood memories were altered. The house was small; one-story, shaped like a box. The yard was large, but not the prairie it used to be and the driveway had crumbled with age and was in desperate need of care. What was once beautiful and prosperous suddenly seemed average. As we drove away I didn’t miss the house, the garden, or the woods but the non-judgmental, open mind I had as a child; a mind that saw possibility in all things and never asked for more than what she had.