The Woods of Childhood

Saturday, April 25, 2009 

I find myself living a few blocks from where I grew up.  Every day I see places familiar to that child aspect of me.  Some I view with great delight, some with deep respect and others with incredible loathing.  These last are becoming fewer and fewer as I move toward wholeness. I drive daily past a stretch of woods along Memorial Parkway in Fort Thomas that carries the deep mysteries of childhood.  40 years ago it was routinely inhabited by underage fairies, Blackbeard, Superman, Robin Hood and Maid Marian, Marco Polo, Rapunzel, Wyatt Earp, King Arthur, and adventurers of all ilk – the wild imaginings of the children from my neighborhood.  It was in this space that I first learned about making my dreams a reality – if only for an afternoon.  And each day I could choose a different reality than the day before and no one found that objectionable.  In this space, I was always protected and safe from anything scary.  Nothing bad ever happened there.  It was a welcome utopia, energized and ringing with the laughter of children.  My deep connection to the woods began in this space and persists (even writing this I have a strong desire to turn off the laptop, find my boots and wander the woods for a bit).  By age 8, this woody area had become my home.  I knew how it connected to other greenspaces and how to travel between them, shunning something as unimaginative as the sidewalk, in favor of the shadows I found there.  I knew where to find the spring peepers and later their tadpoles that I would keep in a jar until they became frogs.  We dared each other to be the first to cross the winter ice on the small pond hidden behind Porter Lane.  I often saw owls and hawks and, as I learned to be more quiet, tiny fawns lying frozen in the brush.  It was in this space I first dreamed of being Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey.  I learned the hard way to identify poison ivy and spent many summers dotted in pink calamine lotion until I did.  I learned how to pound the nails we lifted from my dad’s workbench straight, so as not to waste them, when a small pack of us built our tree house.  (Our parents later forbid us to use the tree house when one of them ventured into our domain and saw it – a flurry of phone calls about unsafe and hazardous.  BLAHBLAHBLAH.  In retrospect, I am sure they were right.  But what did we immortal imagineers care about safety?) I tried to venture back into those woods only once after leaving, while home from college.  To this day I am not sure what I thought I would see through my adult eyes that I had not previously seen through my bright child eyes.  But, it was clear that the magic there no longer recognized me.  The pond had long since been filled in and the tree house torn down.  Sad.  Sadder still was the absence of laughing adventurers in this sacred space.  Where were the children?  Had the imagination-driven world I had experienced in those woods finally succumbed to a Nintendo-driven generation?  Their absence made the woods seem even smaller.  Maybe the magic had gone with us when we left, when we went on to college and our ‘real” lives.  Maybe the magic had just gone to sleep waiting for one tiny adventurer to come out and play? I have since ventured out into other much wider woods.  Most states have felt my boots.  I have experienced a similar magic brush up against me there that I knew so intimately - once upon a time, in my small green woodland in suburban Fort Thomas.  That touch always brings me a sense of intense and present connection to all that is and I relish it whenever and wherever I encounter it.  So even though I am a stranger in those small woods now, I smile every morning when I pass the woods of my childhood on my way to my real grown-up job.  I sigh and think maybe this weekend I will venture back and the magic will be there again.  But I know, even as I think this thought that I won’t do this, that I will get caught up in laundry and phone calls and vegging in front of the TV.    And now my chance to even smile nostalgically is being taken away as the last weeks have seen the trees that were my friends bulldozed to make room for more McMansions in the “City of Beautiful Homes”.  I watch in horror day after day as this blight spreads farther into my secret haven.  NONONONONO!!!  Lamenting a loss so permanent and so unlovely – all for the sake of their worthless thneeds.  The worst was still to come though, for after the trees were removed they were reduced to a mountain of mulch in what seemed like a moment.  Carted away to decorate the lawns of the very same McMansions that will ultimately replace them.  Those towering giants that had provided me shade, had been my worthy opponents, my pirate crew, my princess tower, my resting place and the home of my childhood are gone and Fort Thomas is made so much smaller and less mysterious by their absence.