Upscale and out-skirted at the time, at least; in the intervening years, as the grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away, and as all is Vanity, Riverbend has been built beyond and superseded.
At the time, though, how abundant it all felt! To the point of swelling pride, I must confess. Slightly blameworthy. Understandable, somewhat. Probably pretty harmless. There were six of us in the family at the time, of course. We were two parents, Scott, Susan, Dean and Lisa. Sharon, owing to a remarkable to the point of possibly unprecedented popular uprising, was produced, on demand, just under two years later.
While our house was being built, we lived in a exhilaratingly multi-leveled, endlessly step'd townhouse, just about a mile away.
Rows, after a fashion:
#220; which was where we lived:
Doesn't seem so impressive now, does it? Well. "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,/The earth, and every common sight,/To me did seem/Apparell'd in celestial light..."
I have images and fragmented townhouse episodes in my mind. We ran up and we ran down, continuously. I turned eight. I got sick. I stayed home from school for two weeks. I was on the top floor, looking out my window at the kids playing on the playground of the adjacent school. There was snow on the ground. I had somehow put my hand upon Scott's evocative and already very well thumb'd edition of The Hobbit. Physically, I still felt poorly. Beyond that, beneath and transcending that, I felt transformed. Imagination! Look at those poor kids down there, I thought, much like Harry Lime up on that Ferris wheel.
Through here, to that very school:
Here's a liminal space. Mike Jones and I had a really good fight here, after school one day in Grade 6. I remember making some delicious contact. And being made contact with. No fear, strangely enough, though I definitely wasn't any kind of a bruiser. Don Cherry is partly right, I guess.
