My husband insists that Mill Brook House has returned me to my agrarian roots. I insist I don’t really have agrarian roots, but compared to growing up in a Brooklyn housing project…yes, okay. I grew up on the edge of the Michigan State University campus, an agrarian college, in the early 1950’s. Our neighborhood had been carved from a sizeable farm in the 1920’s, but when the Depression hit, home sales slowed, and there were empty lots even on our block, the first to have been developed. A veterinarian lived and worked in a tiny old house on the corner across the street and next to the deco-trimmed, brick headquarters of the State Police. The vet, Dr. Patton, pastured two horses in the field behind his house, and we fed them sugar cubes when we could get them. (When Patton died, the police bought the property and used it for a parking lot, much to my parents’ relief, for it had been part of a different farm and was zoned commercial. The police even kept the funny old house intact and over many decades used it for offices.)
With stay-at-home moms on every corner and the streets behind our house all dead-ends, we enjoyed what amounted to a huge, three-block-square daycare center. My parents built a stile over our fence so that we could climb from our yard directly into the neighbors’ without having to walk along our own road, which, in the course of time, had turned into a busy commuter route from Lansing to East Lansing. Each yard had its own delights, swing sets, sand boxes, and plenty of trees to climb in. It being the 50’s, new construction was everywhere, and no one thought, in those times, to fence it off, so we enjoyed playing on construction sites, finding nails, and walking up and down half-finished stairways to nowhere. For years small scars remained where I skinned my hands swinging on the naked steel girders of my elementary school's new wing while it was under construction.
In time our “territory” extended to include the school, its generous grounds and the surrounding, unused acreage. There was no fence around the schoolyard, so no one gave much thought to where it ended, other than it was somewhere before the dirt road that ran along the railroad tracks. We got to school on a path that wandered past a cornfield and over a creek bordered by woods. Although we were duly warned at school not to talk to strangers, our parents never supposed our sleepy blocks would attract child molesters, and, as far as I know, they never did. We lived outdoors from April to the end of October and went barefoot all summer.
During my early childhood, my parents tended a sizeable garden in the backyard. I’m told that at one time I had no aversion to tomato worms and happily tore apart the biggest and ugliest of them, but once a fully conscious human being, I developed a horror I retain to this day. (Slaying seven of them one afternoon last summer left me a nauseous wreck.) In addition to the vegetable garden, we had raspberry bushes, from which we harvested berries for our morning cereal, rhubarb and a large asparagus patch, a cherry tree, from whose fruit my parents made pies and jam, an apple tree whose blighted apples nevertheless went into applesauce, and black currents, which we children labored in the hot sun to pick so my mother could make jelly. In addition, we had mulberry trees, which stained our feet and whose fruit we loved to eat. (Eventually my father cut them down because of the mess they made, a decision that felt like a betrayal!)
It was the early 50’s and, politically, the country was going through the worst of times, the McCarthy era, which silenced many a professor at MSU who had come of age in the New Deal era. But none of that filtered down to us. We knew only that on football Saturdays bumper-to-bumper traffic clogged our road, the cats had to be confined indoors, and trips to town carefully planned to avoid the beginning or end of the game. From four blocks away, we could hear the roar of the crowd in the MSU stadium, and we loved watching the airplanes that flew above it, dragging advertising banners we could not yet read.
Nuclear bomb fever also gripped the nation, but just as we didn’t suppose child molesters would be interested in us, so we didn’t expect to be targeted by nuclear warfare. At school we practiced tornado drills but were never subjected to the idiocy of “duck-and-cover.” The Cold War was not on our radar. On the playground, the boys continued to blissfully bomb Tokyo, seemingly unaware that the war with Japan had ended some years before their birth. When tired of dropping payloads on the “Japs,” they wandered off to catch snakes in nearby fields and admire the powerful new “double-diesel” engines that pulled trains along the tracks behind the school and were slowly replacing steam engines. (In kindergarten we visited a roundhouse, a place for turning steam engines around so that they could go back the way they came. I stood dwarfed by the steaming black engine’s giant front wheel, a shiver of fear running through me, but within a few years both the engine and the roundhouse would be obsolete.)
If not agrarian, it was a pastoral childhood and, despite all that the outside world was doing to itself, an incredibly secure one. In contrast to adult life, which speeds by in fits and starts of stress and self-doubt, the first six years of childhood last forever. Garrison Keillor remarked recently that childhood is the only part of our lives that really makes sense. And so, at sixty-five, my “agrarian” past informs my future.
The author (in overalls) and best friend Sandy in the apple tree