The large bicycle with newly painted white fenders required real pedal pushing. It was too big for my short legs but in working class 1959 hand-me-down bikes were it. I flew past the two chestnut trees and screeched to a halt up a dirt road a block or so past my house. Laying the bike on it’s side in the grass at the roadside, I ran across patches of little white wild flowers like tiny daisies with yellow centers, and over a little stream. I clambered up onto some railroad tracks at the entrance to an old, narrow, black metal railroad bridge.
The smell of gummy black creosote and caked oil on the metal in the warm sun was comfortingly familiar. I ran the length of the bridge along the wood planks beside the tracks. At the far end I jumped down onto a metal platform and ducked under the bridge. The supports formed an odd maze of chambers. The first was clearly a kitchen with a metal beam “shelf” for imaginary spices. The hall was a narrow passage under the bridge with two identical square chambers on the left--the bedrooms of course. When you scrunched under the metal plate into a bedroom and sat on the cross bar “seat”, you looked directly into a perfect round hole the size of a dinner plate. Those “mirrors” saw me primp for many an imaginary boyfriend. Down the hall past the bedrooms was the patio, a black metal plate about a yard square that overlooked the creek.
I remember lounging on my patio, sometimes for hours. My only childhood memories of considering the larger questions and possibilities of my life were of sitting on my secret patio, watching the creek trickle through the field of white flowers.
Many years later I took my Dad to that bridge. We squeezed our way through my black; oil caked hideaway and sat for a while on that patio. The creek and flowers were still there but somehow the creosote just smelled dirty. My black and white world was gone.
The smell of gummy black creosote and caked oil on the metal in the warm sun was comfortingly familiar. I ran the length of the bridge along the wood planks beside the tracks. At the far end I jumped down onto a metal platform and ducked under the bridge. The supports formed an odd maze of chambers. The first was clearly a kitchen with a metal beam “shelf” for imaginary spices. The hall was a narrow passage under the bridge with two identical square chambers on the left--the bedrooms of course. When you scrunched under the metal plate into a bedroom and sat on the cross bar “seat”, you looked directly into a perfect round hole the size of a dinner plate. Those “mirrors” saw me primp for many an imaginary boyfriend. Down the hall past the bedrooms was the patio, a black metal plate about a yard square that overlooked the creek.
I remember lounging on my patio, sometimes for hours. My only childhood memories of considering the larger questions and possibilities of my life were of sitting on my secret patio, watching the creek trickle through the field of white flowers.
Many years later I took my Dad to that bridge. We squeezed our way through my black; oil caked hideaway and sat for a while on that patio. The creek and flowers were still there but somehow the creosote just smelled dirty. My black and white world was gone.
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