I met my first love when I was eight.
It was early August, on the day we moved from our first house to what would be the home of my childhood.
I didn’t know that yet. What I knew was what we were leaving behind. The kitchen with the wall-mounted, twirly-corded phone that my mom would stretch to the porch so she could chat while ironing and still see my brother and me in the backyard, where we, with our unadulterated attention spans and no awareness that there could be anything much better to do, made mud pies for hours.
We were leaving behind a front yard covered in weeds—something considered unsolvable because the house was likely built on sand; something my parents talked about so much I wasn’t sure what they would talk about once this house with the face full of stubborn property acne was no longer ours.
We were leaving behind our across the street neighbors who had a large, Boston-suburb number of kids. Many of whom were teenagers, churning through the doors, making all kinds of noises and doing all kinds of things, as if we lived across from a wildlife habitat filled with unpredictable animals. One of them even had a motorcycle.
We were leaving behind the curious floor plan of a split level, where the entry confronted you with a choice, a choose-your-story. Up to eat or sleep, down to watch TV or check on the fish in the fish tank.
Now we were moving to a brand new, clear-faced home one town over. Now we were moving into a colonial, a term that sounded Fancy to my eight-year-old ears. Here there was a foyer and myriad rooms on the same level as the door. Beyond that door: a flat, green, living lawn. We had arrived.
As my parents dealt with boxes and movers, I sat on the front steps of our new house holding the person who’d forced this move, my two-month-old sister, another love of my life and watched as a mess of kids road bikes back and forth in front of us. Back and forth, back and forth, checking out me, something new and surprising in their ecosystem, staring, because of course kids have no use for discretion.
My aunt, sixteen at the time and ultra cool, sat beside me, nudging me. “Go say hi.”
I don’t remember handing her My baby or crossing the lawn to go do this, what I said or who, in the throng of kids, spoke first. I just know that within five minutes I was also on a bike, and for the next ten years I was rarely without these neighborhood kids. And most especially my best friend Nancy.
Nancy was the youngest of nine kids, a span of siblings so great that her oldest brother and sister were her godparents. Whereas our family had a start-up feel, three kids under eight, newly in our newly built house, my parents barely over thirty, Nancy’s family was a corporation, children being raised for years and years in a house that felt deeply established, as if grown from the ground to specifically house their multitudes.
And I joined that corporation like an eager new hire, a tenth kid, always around. Their house would be as much my childhood home as my own. My parents will readily tell you that I did more yard work at Nancy’s than I ever did at ours.
My memories of those years are visceral and tactile, just the way first friendships are. Because before you’re emotionally close, well before you can exchange every secret or deep thought, before your brain matures enough to even have secrets or deep thoughts of note, you are physically close. Nancy and I were right beside each other most waking hours. Attached at the hip, our moms would say, wondering at our fusion. It was romantic, in the truest origin sense—back when romance referred not to love affairs, but to imaginative adventures.
Since boredom is the mother of invention, Nancy and I invented a lot. That’s what I remember—all the things we did. I wish I could know what, for the thousands of hours we were together, we talked about. But though I kept a journal for many of those years, I wrote “NO COMMENT” for most entries. Of course, I’d go on to have so many comments, but back then, I was too tired for documenting at the end of the day. Because the girl at my hip had big ideas and loved industry.
Multiple new houses were being built on our street that first year. Nancy and I would gather lumber scraps from the sites, haul them into one of our backyards, find trees that were reasonable distances apart and start nailing the wood to the trees in something approaching a rectangle. We believed early in outsourcing, so at some point we made three-years-older neighborhood boys into our supers. We couldn’t waste time on our headquarters. We had ribbon barrettes to make, sales numbers to hit, worlds to take.
The best fort we ever built stood for 24 hours. We’d found the perfect layout of trees just beyond a rock wall in Nancy’s backyard. We’d experienced a boon of big sheets of plywood. The result: exquisite.
We barely wanted to leave our new building that first night, but we were both chicken, so once it got dark, we went inside for a sleepover and further planning. Obviously, the place needed window boxes, possibly a roof deck.
In the morning, we raced out to our future, but there was a note posted beside the opening that was the door. Not of congratulations or praise, but of demolition. The rock wall was a property line and the neighbors behind, who were not of our street and therefore not of our world, did not want a surprise structure in their yard. We’d made an honest mistake—the East Coast was just one big backyard back then. People fenced in pools for safety, but not the grass and the trees. Our impression, like so many discoverers before us, was that the land we saw was ours for the taking.
So we found this unjust, to have to tear down such a perfect structure. We judged those non-neighbor people to lack imagination, an understanding of both beauty and childhood. Also to be just pretty picky and mean.
We had the super boys dismantle our building and reassemble it on the right side of the rock wall. It was less perfect—of course it was, perfect things being impossible to hold onto. But it was ours and would do as we scaled our business.
Nancy and I both loved money and the making of it. Not necessarily for its idea or purchasing power. We loved the object of money, the crinkled bills we’d iron against our thighs to coerce into stacks, the distinct odor—it was only paper so I guess the smell was from all the many oily hands that had handled it. Before understanding this was gross, I loved that smell and the sheer pile of it, stashed in my closet beside Halloween candy I could make last until April.
We met so young—I don’t know if Nancy and I both innately felt this way about dollars or we nurtured the idea into each other. But by the time we were ten, we had a mutual checking account, business cards and multiple corporate sales clients. Nancy was the one with the self-start and the drive. She was a fearless networker, calling information—the original internet—to get the number for department store buyers. She secured our first meeting with Bloomingdales. She also phone-treed her way to the Goody Products wholesale department such that we could bulk order the 2-slatted barrettes we’d weave ribbon through. Smaller businesses, especially those run by children, might’ve bought their supplies at CVS. But we were aiming big. We were an Enterprise.
Of course, we commissioned a two-years-younger neighborhood girl for direct sales. We suggested she put her hair in two braids before going door-to-door because we already knew one thing: cute sells! Since the street was a dead end, her sales territory was limited and, at some point, our neighbors did develop a fatigue of our entrepreneurship. I believe our little salesperson usually just had her grandfather buy whatever necessary to make her quotas. I now wonder what a man in his seventies did with so many ribbon barrettes.
In Olympic years, we played Olympics—swim and running races in the summer, speed skating in socks on linoleum in the winter. I can’t remember if we did podium ceremonies, but it seems like something we would’ve. In non-Olympic years, we focused on prepping for the Presidential Fitness test that fall would bring. We’d mark out start and finish lines and time each other. We’d hold each other’s feet to practice sit ups, hoping we could do enough of them in a minute to impress Ronald Reagan, I guess.
On snow days, layered in mattress-thick snowsuits and mittens with idiot strings, we’d sled down the middle of the road, from the top bulb of the cul-de-sac to just beyond Nancy’s.
On summer nights, the whole neighborhood would play capture the flag on opposing lawns of our choosing and not necessarily the lawns of any kid in the group.
I’m not sure what I’d do if twenty kids just showed up and started playing in our yard. I hope I’d find it joyful. But I’d probably also really wonder how long they might stay.
A few years ago, I looked out the window and saw an older woman sitting on a bench by our front lawn. She appeared super happy and content, face turned up to the sun, eyes closed. I went out to ask her what she was doing and though English wasn’t her first language, she was able to tell me she was super happy and content and that she was there to turn her face up to the sun and close her eyes.
She’d found a right place.
There’s no luck quite like it.
I know all about this—I was lucky early.
In place and love.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.