Today I learned that I am indeed actually getting older.
Sometimes it's easy to forget. Sure, I've got a two year old son who's got way more energy than I could even wish for some days, but I get to run around with him and play hide and seek and make believe and things like that keep me young. Plus, I've still got a fairly youthful appearance and am still younger than most of my coworkers and other people that I spend the majority of my time with, so it's easy to forget that I'm actually in my thirties now.
Today I helped my sister move. This was significant for exactly two reasons. The easy one is, I've moved literally at least a dozen times, and helped others moved many times as well. I've been sore after a few times, but, lord, I hurt my back today. I realized after I tried to lift literally the very first thing that I probably should have like, warmed up and stretched or something. When did I get so old that I have to stretch before I lift a TV? Ugh.
So, now I'm sitting here typing this with a back ache. Yuck, but that's not really the reason I'm here.
The more significant reason that today affected me was because of where I was moving my sister from. Sometime in the last year or two she moved in with a man in the neighborhood I grew up in. I'd been there once before, but as a passenger in her car, and I immediately got out of the car and went into her house. Today, I arrived a little early in my own car, and the truck we were loading arrived fairly late. Thus, I ended up (a) being alone in my car driving down streets I used to walk on, ride my bike on, etc, and (b) having about 30-40 minutes to just walk around my neighborhood while I awaited the arrival of the moving truck.
I spent the first 12 years of my life in a house that was so close to the house my sister had been living in that I could see the back yard of my old house from where I parked my car. It was definitely a surreal experience. I hadn't been back in the neighborhood, with the one exception I mentioned above, for over a decade. (Quick tangent: I already feel old knowing that I can say something happened over ten years ago. Like, I graduated college ten years ago this year and man that's really getting to me.) With time to kill and a strange desire to rediscover the place I knew so well as I child, I took a walk. I felt like a weirdo walking around some neighborhood I don't live in, but, frankly, I still recognize a lot of the people that lived there 20 years ago, so it wasn't that odd.
I walked past my childhood home and watched a bit from a distance as the new owners were installing a privacy fence. The deck that starred in so many of my childhood memories is long gone, along with a tree that used to sit on edge of the neighbor's property just off our front porch. The chain link fence that separated our yard from our neighbor's was also long gone, and it made the yard I remember being so tiny look a fair bit bigger. I continued down the road to an old playground I used to frequent. The playground was a relic of a bygone age when I lived there. Basically untouched for years with much of the old playground equipment either completely unusable or of questionable safety by the time I was old enough to use it. A fairly new playground sits in its place now, though it takes up much less space. The old playground was sprawled around through the trees, with a jungle gym here, some swings there, and I recall at one point (though they were removed in my later years living there) a large metal slide and some monkey bars. The old flag pole was still standing from the old park.
I remember as a kid going up to that playground and running into the woods surrounding it down paths trodden by so many other kids and teens in the area. They led down to a creek, and as a kid it was always an adventure to play in those woods. The creek was like a world away from our tiny yard, and we would often get in trouble if we travelled so far away from home on our own. Standing at the top of the hill today, I could see the creek, along with the road on the other side of the creek, and it made me realize how small the whole area was. I swear it was bigger when I was a kid. I don't know if there are fewer trees now, or if I just remember it in the summer months when there are leaves on the trees, but I don't remember ever being able to see the creek from the top of the hill; let alone the road beyond the creek.
Another thing I distinctly remember as a kid is a path that lead past the old "Indian grave stones" (which, incidentally, are just big bricks that are used to close a road), and down to a "cliff" that we would play on because we had to climb up it on our hands and knees. There was even an old dump where we'd pretend we'd fall in and it was super dangerous. I couldn't find the dump. I couldn't identify the specific "cliff" area we used to play on, but there was a pretty steep hillside that led down into a bunch of different houses' back yards. None of the trails I remember were identifiable at this point, though I did find the "grave stones."
There was an old set of city stairs not far from the playground that I used to walk every day on my way to school when I started walking to school. They were a block away from the house I grew up in at the end of what seemed like a dead end road, though at the end you can actually turn up into an alley so it's not a dead end. (Another quick tangent: at the end of that road is a house right where you'd expect the road to dead end. Behind that is another house. It's really strange and the only way to access the other house is through a driveway branching off the alley, but it's still strange. For some reason that second house was a major figure in my nightmares as a kid.) Anyhow, I went down the stairs, which, again, seemed smaller than I remembered.
At the bottom of the stairs is a really old house that's in really rough shape at this point. It wasn't in great shape when I was a kid. Behind that house is an old outbuilding whose purpose I can only guess at, but maybe it was an aviary or something. The house looks like it was a pretty bougie place when it was first built, so I guess it's not unreasonable that the building could be an aviary. It's also possible it was some kind of servants' quarters, though it seems fairly small for people to have actually lived in. At any rate, that building was basically in ruins when I was a preteen, but that didn't stop me and my sisters and friends from using it as a clubhouse. It's still there today, though in an even greater state of ruin than I remember. It really should probably be demolished, as it appears that new children have been using it for the same purpose fairly recently.
The biggest thing I noticed from walking around was just how small everything was. I was able to walk from one end of my neighborhood to the other with minimal effort in just a few minutes. This little three block area used to be my whole world, but now it's just a small neighborhood I could easily explore on foot in less than thirty minutes. That's a real perspective changer to look back on this area when it was the whole world, and it was so big.
The next biggest thing I noticed was just how run down the neighborhood is. I knew we weren't by any stretch well off when I was a kid, but there are just things I would have never noticed until I was an adult. I walked past houses I had been inside as a child, and realized the houses looked exactly the same as they did 20 plus years ago, and that wasn't really a good thing in many cases. My old clubhouse looked like a death trap and I was concerned about the kids who were hanging around in there now. It was cloying to rip of the rosy glasses of the memories of my youth and see just how ramshackle a lot of that neighborhood is.
So, anyhow, it was a fairly surreal experience. It was like seeing my life from a different perspective, and it was...odd to say the least. I guess it took walking around my old stomping grounds to realize that I'm getting old, and nostalgia for the days of my youth has started to set in. Oh, youth. Oh nostaglia.
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