Little Brothers

The woods, sleepy baseball field, elementary school playground, and retaining pond that reposed at the end of 3rd Avenue, the tree lined street of the little steel mill town upon which my brothers and I lived, were shrouded in the mists of myth and magic that only the minds of those between the ages of 8 and 11 can conjure. The woods were filled with Native American burial grounds, hidden treasures buried by ancient pioneers and deadly tigers, all of which existed in our still developing and still imaginative minds. The retaining pond housed a sunken house, populated by unspeakable horrors that would pull you under if you dared break its green hued, algae-covered surface. The steel mill at the edge of town, flanked by the town’s little league baseball field and Catholic church, which resembled more a dormitory for seasonal workers than it did an actual house of worship, became a mechanical monster, munching its way through the trees late at night when you couldn’t sleep and the rhythmic clanging of industry echoed through the sleeping town. The elementary school playground, with its chains and belt seats, became the fighter jets upon which we swooped and dove through blue, cloudless skies, and ejected from at heights that were dangerous to older, less pliable individuals. All of these thrilling, frightening, and exhilarating surroundings formed the backdrop for events that continue to resonate in the deep recesses of my soul.

There’s something about the experiences one has at that young age that bury themselves in your psyche and take root, forming a foundation for how you view the world, and end up spreading through your dreams and shading the quiet moments of your adult life. The heavy dew upon the spring grass that parts as you shuffle through it early on a Saturday morning, and the intoxicating smell of the newly blooming lilac bush at the edge of your backyard, form pictures that your mind can call up decades later and come into view as if they were developed mere hours ago. And when your thoughts align just right, the remembered smell of those fresh lilac blooms which took root in the olfactory neurons of your nasal passages, through some incomprehensible, also almost magical process, can again fill the air around you. These lush surroundings formed the sights, sounds, and smells that forever inscribed upon your memories the experiences that defined who you were and who you became. If you’re willing to allow the memories of those times to descend like leaves through the setting sunlight and land softly, where they will, upon those misty, magical, and myth filled grounds of your mind, they will tell you where you are going, like the scattered pages of a novel or sacred, spectral text whose pages fit together and tell your story, no matter how you scoop them up and arrange them.

Populating these memories are not just the sights, sounds, and smells of those long ago days, but the people that lived them alongside you. For me, it was my little brothers, Scott and Tommy. Together we braved, with our friends, the haunted houses, mysterious woods, deep scary ponds, and freedom bestowing streets and alleys of our little town in the cool spring and autumn and temperate summers of the dawning years of our young lives.