Short story 2

Choice Essay - Growing Up in Alpine

I was seven when my family moved. Our first night in the new home we drank Martinelli’s and gave toasts over New Year’s resolutions and the ball dropping in New York; we all slept on the living room floor—cousins, brothers, parents—rolled up in our thick winter blankets. That winter we built snow forts and sledded on the hill behind our house and it quickly came to feel like home.  The empty lots around ours were hills and fields of snowed-over scrub oak stands and sagebrush and tumble-weed shoots, fields and freedom that my brothers and I loved. Eventually summer came, and with it came days spent exploring the miniature forests surrounding us—the short, twisted Scrub-Oak trees were a wilderness of passages and hidden caverns and we claimed them as our own.  Deer must have slept in those hidden spaces before us, because they were protected and cozy, with fallen leaves covering the grassy, earthen floor.  My older brothers found a rusted saw and cut off stray branches, widened the opening to one of these groves and inside we stashed our bow and arrows with any and all assorted objects we found in these fields, including the acorns we used as ammunition.  The grove was our refuge and clubhouse, and it smelled of dusty leaves and dry summers.  The saw was always inside, blue handle leaning against gnarled trunks, teeth rusted and brown.

A few years passed and the lot with our Scrub-Oak clubhouse was bought. We watched from our grass yard, from our hill, from the grove as trucks came and bulldozed our shooting fields. Our arrows found new targets elsewhere and we continued to watch as a basement was dug and blue dumpsters larger than our van were hauled in.  There were always sounds coming from that lot—trucks beeping, large objects hitting other large objects, metal clanging, engines roaring.  Construction began and the wooden skeleton that rose from concrete began to grow and take form.  Each night the workers would leave and we were left alone with our land again, now with a graveyard of lumber to explore.  The unfinished home became our haunt and gradually, as it grew higher and more complete we had an entire building with bedrooms and windows to roam, a place where sawdust coated stair rails and even in the cement basement, where light came only faintly from high-above windows and stairwells, the air smelled of freshly-cut wood.  

The dumpsters were marvels in themselves.  Unwanted or unusable lumber was discarded there; two great blue boxes with planks and wooden limbs protruding from them into the sky, to be recycled or wasted…  my brothers and I seized the opportunity.  We relieved the dumpsters of some of their weight, and a makeshift fort began to rise in the wilds behind our house.  Wooden planks were stacked and nailed together, fitted atop each other, like the laying of a giant Lego house.  When completed, the fort was squat and square and rose about six feet tall, with an opening for a door and a flat plank roof.  This hideout joined the scrub-oak stand in becoming strictly ours; a place to stay and hide and pretend.  Soft green grass—almost heather-like—grew inside, protected from the dry summer heat.  We cleared a path through the tumble-weeds to the fort, and against the back we leaned a wooden board to make a lean-to where we kept tools and our unused nails.

The neighbors’ home was finished and moved into and for a while the new neighbors joined us in our adventures, but before long they dug up our scrub-oak stands and replaced them with sod and rock work -- our whole neighborhood came to lay sod, drink soda, and flip burgers. My brothers and I clung to our fort then and spent our days inside and around it, roaming on what land we still had. But within a few years and despite my protests it too was torn-up and replaced with a playground. We swung and used the slide until after a few years that, too, was sold and landscaped over. That playground was the play-place of my younger brothers who don’t remember a time without grass and neighbors. Their shooting range consisted of arrows into the sledding hill, which is still behind our home and has not yet been sold or built over.  I went home last weekend and saw only a landscaped yard and a yellow hill beside it, with nothing to betray the years of scrub-oak groves and archery practice but the blue saw that rests in our garage, unused now, but rusted as ever. Mom has constantly been polishing the yard to perfection but secretly, I’m still in love with the wild groves and tangled fields of long grass and weeds, still absentmindedly searching for an arrow hidden somewhere in them -- beneath the pool, behind the landscaping -- because we never could find the last ones we shot.