When We Left The City
1962
You are greeted by two pine trees by the doorway…
That’s how my poem began. I was about eleven years old, and my father had just bought an old brick house on Long Island (for $12,000, spread across a thirty-year mortgage) and I was anticipating my family’s move from the city, and the beginning of an idyllic life in what was then “the country”.
And so I wrote a poem.
I can’t recall it in its entirety, but I know that the poem went on to mention cheery rooms–actually, I used the word “blythe”, which I had encountered in my reading somewhere. Looking it up today, I see that it means “casual, heedless, and lacking consideration”, but in a more archaic sense it can refer to a “happy, lighthearted character or disposition” and that’s how I imagined the ambiance of our family house.
But the best lines in this poem, which popped into my head recently for no apparent reason, were these:
To have a horse out there I will be able.
The old garage would make a lovely stable.
Yes, I suppose I had a horse crush then, an infatuation that seems to afflict little girls everywhere for varying periods of time, even in the city. I knew nothing of horses, but it seems I vaguely wanted one.
Alas, none of this was to be, other than the pine trees by the doorway, which stood tall until destroyed by a suspicious fire in the late 1990s, along with the rest of the house, after it was no longer owned by my family. Our years in the house, however, long before the fire, were sadly lacking in cheer, marred by tragedy and dysfunction, and very much minus a horse. I’ve written about the Long Island years ad nauseam, and that’s not where I’m going today. What astonishes me, and charms me, really, is the hopeful spirit of the little girl who imagined it all so differently, her excitement so unbridled, she put it into verse, and even believed there might be a horse in the picture.
It fills me with a kind of protectiveness, not just for the long-gone child that was me, but for all children. The touching innocence, the precious ability to imagine…I want to encourage and cherish that in every child I meet.
Another thing I love about this snippet of remembered childhood poetry is the way it inadvertently foretells the life I found decades later, thereby reinforcing my almost-religious conviction that outrageous hope is often rewarded, the impossible sometimes happens, and a long, circuitous counter-intuitive path can lead you to exactly what you once upon a long-ago time hoped to find.
I don’t have a horse, but my daughter did, and I certainly would have been able to. But there are cows and cowgirls out here, and the rooms of my house are sunlit and welcoming, and in lieu of pine trees there are macadamias, fruit trees, and sycamores, and in particular, two oak saplings that I myself planted from acorns. Those little oaks excite me in the same future-oriented way of the girl from Brooklyn, imagining a time and place yet to come, except that in this projection, I am very old and eventually dead, and yet the trees outlive me, and that gives me a great deal of joy.
I’ve been reading a book called Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit. She writes: There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about 100 years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory…To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer timescale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.
In my dreams of home, trees always greet me. And the child I was still watches in wonder. She has learned that a detour does not end a story, and that words too can be a kind of saeculum.