My Imaginary Childhood

When I was a little pre-reading kid, my parents read aloud to me, and some of those picture books were Little Golden Books. The only one I really remember well (and it’s somewhat because they saved that book) was A Day at the Playground, which I apparently called “Donny Donaldson,” after the book’s main character. The book was illustrated, as many of the Little Golden Books were, by Eloise Wilkin. And there was a standard sort of neighborhood depicted in those books.

Those neighborhoods were tree-lined streets with sidewalks and teeming with little children who were always outdoor playing. They were running and triking and biking and skating down those sidewalks underneath those big ol’ trees. They played in the dappled days of spring, when the trees were just budding out and spring flowers swayed in springtime breezes. The kids laughed and splashed under the shade of those leafy trees in the summer.

In the fall, the boys and girls wore jackets and sweaters as they jumped into piles of brightly colored fall leaves or walked though sunbeams slanting through the woods. And in the winter, they wore snowsuits and snow boots as they sledded down a nearby hill or built snowmen in their front yards on the streets lined with bare-branched trees.

I loved those neighborhoods! I wanted to live in those neighborhoods! Where were those neighborhoods?!?

When were we going to get some of those trees? When was I going to get a snowsuit? When was I going to get enough snow to build a REAL snowman? A snowman that would be made of balls of snow that you had to roll around and around to make large enough. Larger than a snowman that came up my knees. My five-year-old knees.

I was in Fort Worth last week, and took Peter on walks a couple of times a day. Their house was built in the 20’s and it is an old, established, well-kept-up neighborhood. Many trees have dropped their leaves, and we crunched and swished our way through some deep spots on the sidewalk. Some trees were just dropping their leaves, and as I looked down the sidewalks, I thought, “This is the way a neighborhood is supposed to look!”

It was the imaginary neighborhood of my childhood! I sighed deep sighs and felt great joy and satisfaction, walking through the fall afternoons along these streets, and everything felt just right.

In all fairness, my parents moved us, twice, to brand-new homes in new housing developments, which were being built on what had been prairie. The only tree original to our lot is the pecan tree in the back yard, which went in in the fall of 1959, I think. It’s ‘way tall and I cannot reach my arms around it. We’re still waiting for some of the other trees to catch up.