Cedars in the Mist

There are a lot of these trees around here...deodar cedars to be exact. They tend to be very tall and rather gangly but they do remind me of my childhood when we lived on a street unaccountably called Fair Oaks, since it was lined with a row of deodars. I can remember lying in bed in the morning listening to the call and response of a pair of doves in those tree tops.

Our house was one of a row of three very similar houses at the end of  a long driveway. Presumably they had once constituted the stables and outbuildings for a large house at the top of the row. Even back then, it seemed a bit derelict and we didn't know who lived there.

Our property was divided into segments named by my parents 'the Back Yard', 'the South 40', 'the Corral' (surrounded by a rather nice stone wall) and 'the Lawn'. They seemed like enormous spaces, each filled with unique places to be explored, including a large pepper tree which I would climb into to sit on a branch and read. It was in the Back Yard where my mother hung out the laundry on three long straight lines to dry. One year she grew a row of pea plants next to it and to this day I love to eat raw peas straight out of the pod as I did while she hung the laundry.

My father was always complaining about the deferred maintenance in the South 40, but I had a little cave fort in the bushes at the bottom and thought it was all quite delightful, if a bit weedy and thorny. Mowing the lawn was a special delight as my father pushed his hand mower back and forth catching the grass in a special catcher attached to the back of it. This he would dump into a wheelbarrow which I would ride in on the trip to the compost pile. There was a swing hanging from a tree on which I sat surveying Dad' toiling back and forth.  I still love the smell of freshly mown grass although as lawns disappear, replaced by drought tolerant plants or are mowed by smelly power mowers, it is no longer a Saturday morning sensory memory.

Somewhere we still have a picture of the front of our house and driveway on the day it snowed, and pictures of my brother and me in cowboy hats on a pony brought round by the photographer for family photo ops. I watched my first television program in the top of the three houses...an episode of the Mickey Mouse Club. We didn't get a television in our house until I was in Junior High school, and we lived in a different house across town.

I have a feeling that if I were to visit there today, if the houses are still there at all,  the spaces around them would seem very small, diminished by my adult perspective ,but still grand in my memories.