Conservation in Context
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Worlds of My Own (Prize Essay)
The first house we lived in that I remember was an ugly yellow brick building, the front of it scarred by rusty iron fire-escapes. In the back, separating our house from the one on the next street, it had a narrow alleyway that was always hung with washing on sunny afternoons, the tremendous sheets billowing on the lines like cheeks puffed by the wind. We had moved there because it was near to the subway station and easier for my father to travel to work. In fact, the house was chosen because of its nearness to everything, to the stores where Mother would have to shop, to the school for my sister—I was still too young to attend—and to the homes of various close friends and relatives. It had been picked with an eye keen to every convenience except the consolation of a tree-shaded street and adequate ventilation on a summer afternoon. There wasn't a tree on the whole length of the street, not even a cluster of dried, yellow grass, only the grey, endless pavement marked by our drawings in colored penny chalk. The house faced upon a busy thoroughfare, noisy with constant traffic until far into the night, so that there were many evenings when I lay sleepy-eyed in bed, listening to the whirr of tire wheels on the pavement below and the grinding of brakes as a car came to a belated stop, and wishing that I could dream. I made up a device, though, by which I lulled myself to sleep. I used to imagine that I was the person who rode in each automobile that I heard rumble monotonously into the night, weaving gay, adventure threaded tales about the placesl had come from and the places to which I was going; and in this way I often dreamed myself to sleep. The traffic had another important effect in that it kept my play confined to the narrow alleyway back of the house that the women used to like to disguise by calling a backyard. All the small children from the adjoining houses used to play in that backyard. Early in the morning and after lunch their mothers left them there where they would be certain to be safe From the heat and the traffic of the busy street and did not call for them again until just before the sun went down. It was a small world where big people seldom intruded, a world bounded by the yellow brick walls of the apartment houses, which didn't seem to be quite so ugly when we were at play. We used to conceal ourselves behind the billowing sheets on the wash line when we played at "hide-and-seek," or look up at the high walls that loomed up so perpendicularly from the pavement and try to discover which of the uncurtained windows was ours. The slender chimneys seemed to jab into the sky, and our little world was a narrow canyon closed on both sides by high smooth surfaced walls that seemed to begin somewhere beneath the pavement and end in the sky. Somehow there wasn't adequate ventilation in the apartment. and summer evenings were the worst part of living there. For my room had only one window and the sultry, stagnant air didn't seem to be able to escape. I lay irritably awake in my bed many nights, whimpering in fretful impatience for sleep to come. I remember one night when the sultriness in my room became almost unbearable, and Mother placed a blanket and cool pillow out on the fire-escape for me to sleep on. I had the strangest feeling lying there, as if I could feel the sky warm and soft about me and hold it in the palms of my hands without even lifting up my hand to touch it. I said a prayer that night, a quiet, voiceless prayer to the sky, though now I no longer remember the words nor what I prayed for. I soon fell into a dreamless sleep, and the moment never came back. It wasn't long after this summer evening that we learned that my father was to be transferred to Long Island, which meant that we would have to move out there. Mother professed a sudden dislike for losing the friendship she had acquired and all the comforts she had suddenly discovered in the apartment although my sister and I were both eagerly looking forward to the change. The new house on Perry Road was like a different world from the one we had been living in. It was a neat, red house with many windows and window sills with potted begonias and only three families, besides ours, living there. There were trees planted all along the street, tall, slender young saplings that I watched grow straight and strong in the eight years we lived on Perry Road. The tree in front of our house never grew up, though. I use to watch it from my window, its slender branches etched inky black against the sky at dusk. It never grew any taller or stronger. Beatrice and I called it our Peter Pan, and it became part of the fairy land that we built up on Perry Road. There was a small garden in front of our house, grown with peonies and dripping white lilacs and green leaves laced in intricate patternwork. It was attended to only spasmodically by the janitress' son, and Beatrice and I gladly took over the task. The janitress' boy showed us how to trim the hedges and pull up the weeds with one strong jerk, and keep the lilac bushes, that we used to like to call snowdrops, well tended. My room had three large windows; two of them looked down upon the garden and the slender tree with the green shoots, and the third gazed out upon McKinley Street and a small cluster of red cottages in the distance. And sometimes on cool, spring mornings the faint smell of lilacs and fresh. green grass used to drift into my room. The house on Perry Road couldn't have been a greater contrast to the yellow brick building we had lived in if we had deliberately sought to find one. The street in front of our house wasn't even paved; they didn't begin to pave it until after we had been living there for two years and other neat, red brick houses like ours had begun to be built nearby. Cars were seldom seen on the unpaved, pebble-strewn thoroughfare; and when they were, it was usually because they had somehow lost their way. It was strange, at first, to become accustomed to the silence on Perry Road, unbroken except by the sounds of the crickets in the night. There weren't any young children of my age there except the janitress' boy, who wasn't very friendly: and so Beatrice and I used to do all sorts of things together. We used to ride up as far as we could on our bicycles, bumping over the hilly roads and then alighting and exploring the places where the grass grew coarse and yellow and as high as my knees. We became very close friends, closer, I think, than we've ever been since; but it only lasted until Perry Road became paved and more populated, and Beatrice yielded to the lure of the older boys and the girls in the angora sweaters and bright red lipstick who moved there. Somehow the loneliness of this out-of-the-way place bore heaviest on Mother. She liked the slow rumble of city traffic, the feeling of hard pavement always under her feet, the brick apartment houses stretching taller to reach the sky. The loneliness and the bigness of Perry Road seemed to hurt her; the frequent stretches of green, jungle growth and the heavy silence of the nights made her shrink into herself, become solitary and guarded much of the time. But for me there was never loneliness on Perry Road; but aloneness; and I grew in that aloneness. I never felt the lack of friendship. I built up a fairy world around the lilac bushes and the peonies in the garden and the tree that never grew big, a world that Beatrice and I shared implicitly for almost two years. But Perry Road grew up all too soon; the street was made into a broad ribbon of concrete. Other red brick houses appeared at regular interval along the block, and boys and girls came to live there. First Beatrice, and then I left the world of the garden, but I came back often whenever there was something big I wanted to think about and, later on, when I was terribly frightened because Mother had been ill for so long. The garden held strange, healing quality for me. It was a small world of my own. Like the other world of the narrow backyard and the billowing wash on the lines like sails blown by the wind, but a much lovelier world. Soon after we moved to Perry Road, I started attending school. It we' a rather large, brisk-looking building, almost city-like and strangely inconsistent with the wide stretches of country all about it. The long walks together that Beatrice and I shared to and from school were among the loveliest memories that I shall ever have. Each day we walked by a different path to school some days along broad, well-paved thoroughfares where the streets, noisy with children, and the dirty brick-stooped houses, reminded us of the city streets that we had left. And on some days we walked along narrow lanes still thickly grown with tall, yellow grass, that had been used as cow paths before the farms had been driven from the landscape. While Beatrice was still busy with the new social set that had grown up on Perry Road, and I, with school and the few friendships I had acquired, Mother became ill. She had been secluded and withdrawn into herself away from the vital city life that was so much a part of her happiness. She was ill for a long time, for so long a time that the thought of death seemed to take on a sudden, terrible nearness. When she grew well again, we moved away from Perry Road, away from the garden we had tended so carefully and the tree that had never grown up, away from the paved street we had watched them pave, and the red brick houses we had watched them build It was like leaving a small child whom we had watched grow up, a child who had become an important part of the family. We moved into the huge brick apartment house where we now live, a house with tiled floors and a self-service elevator and long corridors with grey doors marked by consecutive numbers and foreign sounding names printed on neat, white cards. There is a narrow alleyway back of the house, adorned by stunted green shrubbery where the mothers leave their small children on warm afternoons. Once when I watched them playing in the backyard, I noticed a plump little girl with dark hair pasted to her forehead in damp curls and I had the strange feeling that I was watching myself before we had moved to Perry Road. It seemed as if we had been living in a huge circle, and that now we were right back to where we had started from, to the ugly brick building, the grey, endless pavement marked by drawings in colored penny chalk, and the low rumble of traffic at night. But the house I live in now has one redeeming feature. There is a park across the street with tall, straight trees with wart-covered trunks and a wide carpet of closely cropped green grass. The windows of my room face upon the park. but I miss the smell of lilacs and fresh, green grass that used to drift into my room on cool, spring mornings in the house on Perry Road. There is a flower path in the park across the street, with dahlias and roses and nasturtiums, that are watered methodically by a gardener every day; but they are arranged in mechanical, geometrical patterns that make them seem somehow distorted and ugly. I spend a great deal of my time in the park, and on warm afternoons I go there to do my homework or to read or simply to sit there and wonder about the world. Just before dusk the families pour out of the huge, brick buildings and walk briefly in the park; and I find my favorite seat on a small cluster of rocks almost hidden behind a large tree, and I watch the world go by. I seek out these smooth, grey rocks often, whenever there is something that I want to think quietly about. It has become for me another private world unshared by anyone, like the backyard and the garden. Those rocks are like a small world lost in the middle of the universe, yet fenced off somehow by pale pickets that no one dares trespass. It seems that I have always had a small world of my own, one to think in and to be alone in wherever I have lived; and somehow I feel that as long as I have one, I can be happy in my aloneness.
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