The Hill - re-posted by request

The Hill

Thursday, May 22, 2008 by JLC

If you laid down in the field behind my parents' house on a summer day you would hear birds chirping, a far off lawn mower and the distant whine of a dirt bike engine. You would hear the buzz of an insect and eventually the roar of an airplane coming in for a landing. Roaring so low you would wave to the pilot and almost see the sunlight glint off of his sunglasses.

If you laid there in the field, you would be surrounded by the golden hay, sweet smell of hot soil and straw. A golden cradle, holding your arms and legs just above the ground. The puffed up clouds would slide slowly across the sky. The sound of bicycles whizzing by, heading to The Hill and the forts and the golf course. Through a broken chain-link fence, where the pine trees grow in perfect lines. Too perfect for Mother Nature to have planted.

If you crossed that field behind my parents' house you knew about the Grandfather Tree. You remember standing inside its trunk, arms wound tightly around you, scared to death that the dark and the damp harbored an eight-legged danger. There at its base, you stood with your head tipped back, looking straight up at its twisted limbs and gnarled branching stretching forever outward. Reaching for whoever would come to stand in awe at its beauty, its ageless and black form.

If you stood in that field and looked over at the house, (was it blue then? gray or white?), that held seven friends and then there were six. And you listened for their voices or a reason to visit. Two doors over, three of my nearest and dearest, one was sure to come my way.

One family. We were really one family. Dinners and sleepovers. Borrowed green tents from the green house with almost no green lawn. A puddle the size of a pond at the end of that driveway... a perfect runway for any respectable dirt bike.

If you knelt in that field behind my parents' house, you buried your beloved four-legged friends where the straw stopped and the trees started. Little crosses made out of sticks, long dead flowers and chalk-written eulogies. You held your friend's hand and cried at the pain, the loss and any other thing that begged for tears.

If you sat in that field, you knew the sheer bliss of hurtling down The Hill’s main trail on a plastic, saucer sled. Spinning and screaming all the way down. Only to have to trudge all the way back up again. Ice and snow finding its way inside a carefully covered mitten’s opening, inside a tucked pants bottom. Snowmobile boots couldn't protect you from The Hill's frozen promise of runny noses and red cheeks.

If you close your eyes, we're all still there. Looking up at the sun, lying in a field behind my parents' house.