Susan Cameron, copyright 2013
Shut your eyes the next time you smell freshly-cut grass -- shut them and let that scent take you back in time and space. Where does your memory take you?
As for me -- there I was, pushing the rusty old lawnmower through the ankle-high grass on a warm, humid summer's day in Detroit. We didn't own the fancy kind with an engine. Who would waste good money on an expensive thing like that when there was a healthy twelve year old girl to push the old one? It was my job to mow the lawn, and I (sometimes) liked it. The front lawn was pretty basic, just two patches of grass flanking the front walkway to the stoop, but the garage-less back yard was a different thing entirely. I'd push the mower down the skinny walkway alongside the house and enter a world of scent and color.
I had to be careful not to mow too close to the border of lilies of the valley, so aromatic, their waxy creamy blossoms arching over the edge too near my whirring blades. I'd mow around the sun-dappled Rose of Sharon tree just as carefully; I didn't want to bump into it and disturb the bees humming deep in the pinky-purple trumpet-shaped flowers. There was a patch of wild violets hiding in a hollow next to the Rose of Sharon, beautiful tiny visitors my grandmother forced me to evict from the premises (I'd asked for special dispensation for them, but the judge said no). Further back, the snowball bush was in full bloom too; each snowball was comprised of hundreds of tiny white flowers, and every snowball was bigger than my fist. The bush had been there so long, it wasn't a bush any more. It was gigantic, so big you could barely see past it to the lilac bush in the corner.
The lilac bush was old too, and huge -- it had become a lilac tree. The dowager lilac tree draped her purple robes over the rickety wood-and-wire fence that separated the yard from the alley and hid the telephone pole that secretly propped her up. The individual blossoms were every color from almost blue to lavender pink to deepest purple, and the scent of the lilacs in bloom was so strong it could make you woozy. I'd cut the grass around her, then come back with shears, and fill one aromatic vase that would scent our entire small house.
I was thinking of those lilacs when I looked up the old house on Google. Detroit's bankruptcy is big news at the moment -- a million people have left, and so has hope. They say one picture is worth a thousand words:
https://www.google.com/maps?q=&layer=c&z=17&iwloc=A&sll=42.424350,-82.981418&cbp=13,182.0,0,0,0&cbll=42.424581,-82.981407&sa=X&ei=B1L3UYXwE8XgiwKi6oG4Dg&ved=0CC4QxB0wAA
I wonder if the ghosts of flowers haunt the ghetto? Do the gangbangers and block bosses ever lift up their heads and sniff the air, confused by the scent of lilacs?
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Wonderful images. I could really see the flowers and the lawns until I looked at the missing house and realized that none of our memories can be proven - they can just be shared and how nice it is that yours are so clear and wonderful and thought/feeling/visually evocative even with the proof gone. By the way - when scanning around there are still some nice houses there with nice cars and did you notice the "kid" walking in front of the place where your house was?
ReplyDeleteActually, the small white house to the right of the vacant lot is where I lived. (Google won't let me put a link any closer to it; I've tried). There was once a little brick house on that vacant lot to the left; if you zoom in on the house to the right of mine, you'll see the gang graffiti and busted-out windows. There are some nice cars and houses next to hellacious abandoned dumps. The whole east side is like that; meadow, nice tidy house, crack house, abandoned house, burned-out abandoned house, meadow.
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely piece that evoked so many memories for me. Your yard seems like mine--a real yard with grass and flowers and shrubs, not one of these California-planned "parks" with fountains, and sculptured beds, and brick planters and everything so neat and perfect that it's great to look at through the window in the kitchen, but you'd never really go play in a yard like that. Our yards we could play in and we had lots of flowers and lots of beds but they were sort of haphazard and not always perfectly linear and sometimes, like the wild violets, something unexpected poked its head up. And we had dandelions and clover and we used to dream away days blowing away the dandelion whisps or searching for four-leaf clovers.I think more has been lost in Detroit and other cities than just the old neighborhoods we used to love--something about the character of life has been lost, something irreplaceable.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, kids played in yards -- Red Rover Red Rover, Mother May I, tag, hide and seek when we were little; making forts out of discarded cardboard boxes and random lumber bits; then whacking away at badminton when we were older. Picking dandelions and watching the bees in the clover, finding a penny and walking blocks to the corner store to spend it -- days were long and unstructured, and you didn't have to come home until the street lights came on. Now, in Detroit, street lights don't always come on because there's no money for it, and if you were a kid with a penny, you might get mugged for it.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right. Something irreplaceable has been lost, and not just in dysfunctional Detroit -- a way of childhood, yes, but a way of living life itself. Even adults would stroll around at dusk, waving to neighbors, joining together on somebody's porch for iced tea or a beer, listening to the ball game on the transistor radio perched on the rail. Adults didn't have to spend their evenings on the internet updating their LinkedIn and Facebook pages, trying to impress random strangers, networking and promoting their brands with the gnawing anxiety that if they didn't, they'd be twisting in the wind during the next round of layoffs.
Funny me saying that, because there were always rounds of layoffs at the auto plants when I was growing up; but there was an attitude of certainty that this, too, shall pass, and the job will be there when things improve. Maybe that's Detroit's Achilles heel: bad times aren't passing, but the people who remain think they will.
Such a beautifully evocative piece - and so poignant. Makes me think mostly of the house where we lived in Havertown, PA. What I remember most are the wide open grassy back yards that all blended into one another without fences or walls to make a great big park that we kids ran free in. Then there was the Bamboo Patch - a vacant lot next to the church at the bottom of the hill full of weeds and tall bamboo and poison ivy. Of course, we didn't know about the poison ivy until later that night when we itched like crazy. Didn't keep us from playing in the Bamboo Patch, though. Hooligans all of us.
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