the magic of memories

The house I lived in until I was 7 had an array of magical qualities. To start with, there were its unique interior areas, two of which belonged exclusively to each of my parents and proved to be places that I would later realize really defined them. For my father, it was his study, where I tended to go only to play Frogger on the tv screen that he had hooked up to his Apple IIe computer. When I entered, he was usually leaning back in a deep-seated, blue-cushioned arm chair on legs that rocked and swiveled, tapping the tips of his fingers together and staring contemplatively at the wall. A pad of lined yellow paper would lie on the desk before him, and in his fine-pointed but jagged handwriting, numbers and occasional roman and greek letters would cover the pages with equations and possible solutions.

This room was special because it was Daddy's, and because it had a stone floor that brought the temperature down a few degrees from the rest of the house (which made it a particularly enticing place to be in the summer). It also had its own aroma, and I never thought anything of that smell, it coming from a place that already seemed to generate within it its own, quiet universe. It wasn't until years after we'd moved out of that house, when I was 15 and out shopping with my mom and brother, that anyone clued me in to the source of that curious odor. I'd been at a concert the night before, and to it I'd worn a hideous army green and gray jacket of my father's from the 1960s, which I liked for its butterfly collar and heavy, warm feel. As we walked through some affluent suburban mall, my brother chuckled and commented, "It's been a long time since that jacket smelled of THAT." Naive, innocent, extremely pure, I balked. He could not be telling me something about my father I had never known. He shook his head, grinning, and asked me if I knew that smell. I shook my head no, looking to my mother for help, but she was looking away, cheeks growing red, not fond of any of this. "Cigarette smoke?" I asked, hoping. And his grin grew devilish, as it does so often, and he challenged me simply: "Don't you remember the study smell?"

Then I could no longer resist putting two and two together; I knew what my jacket smelled of; but my brain had not wanted to make the association. Soon I would reprimand my father, telling him a good parent does not smoke pot around his children, much less at all, and he would be bashful and embarrassed; but a few years later, he would coach me, and we would have found a funny thing to bond over, much like when he taught me to hike the ball to him when we played football in the front yard, or to catch blue crabs and then clean them, or to ride a bicycle, or to catch lizards in the woods, but just a little bit odder.

Mom's space was in the basement. It spread the entire length of the small house, from the stairs that descended from the narrow kitchen to the back wall along which ran our bedrooms. On one of the long sides, a garage door hung from the ceiling, and she would roll it back up and open and sit atop her kick wheel or her electric wheel, just inside from her garden, and there she would throw hundreds (maybe thousands) of carefully crafted pots. She made everything we used, from dinner plates to ice cream bowls to elegant goblets and sugar dishes. She sold many of her creations, sent others to family members, and kept yet others; for her, the beauty was in the act of creating them; her joy was in the act of creating them. She spent hours down there, and sometimes I would tiptoe through, playing with discarded bits of clay or facing off with the kiln, whose knobs glowed red when it was on and this was supposed to be an indicator that I should be far away from it (but how could I be?). I believed it to be living, a monster, and when she wasn't there, I would see how long I could stand to face it before tearing up the stairs to the comfort of the stuffed animals on my bed above.

In that house, we had heating vents in the floors, and sometimes I would sit on the big one outside my bedroom and listen to her. I associated the making of pots with the noises I heard when seated above her: the whirring of the wheel, the slurping of wet clay against her skin as it spun, the thumping of her foot against the surface of the kick wheel to keep it going. When I would sit near her and watch, I focused on her legs, not being tall enough to see her hands, and so I marveled, later in life, when I realized how much I associated her potting with the kicking and not much at all with the strong hands that pulled clay from lumps into curvacious and precise formations.

Outside the house, the magical spaces multiplied. We had three backyards, and they could keep me busy for entire summers, whether I was collecting the black beads of tiger lilies, trying to shimmy my way up a bamboo stalk, gathering sticks and monkey grass for fort-building, or touching the gray tips of pussy willows and wondering how Earth gave bloom to something so rabbity soft. Sometimes, as I tiptoed across the long green wooden board my father had laid across the swampy land of the third yard, I danced a little, daring the board to drop me as I moved less carefully than normal. Sometimes, as I immersed myself in the creek beyond, I daydreamed of lifting my feet and letting the water carry me downstream, over the small rapids past which I was not allowed to go exploring.

Upriver, my neighbor Louise and I found a stand of bamboo growing out of a sandy shoulder along the creek, and there we built an entire apartment, designating this group of trees as a kitchen and that group as a sitting area. That part of the creek was closer to Louise's house, so we usually returned home through the long, thick woods that ran from it to her yard. This was a more treacherous area, not carefully looked after by a father who thought the outdoors were the best playground imaginable for little ones. We would stumble into briars, fall through thick beds of pine straw padding the area over an open hole, scrape our faces on sharp tree branches that should've been cut down once they had fallen dead. When we got back to the safety of her swingset (not, mind you, more than 100 or 200 yards from the creek, I would guess), we rarely stayed there. Rather, we immediately headed to the best of all places in our magical world, which was Mrs. Topes' yard, the one that lay between the two of ours.

Mrs. Tope was in her 90s, which meant that to me, she seemed as old as a human could ever be. Her used car salesman husband seemed a little younger, though he died much earlier, and he was rarely around. So it was she who welcomed us to come into her yard or her home anytime, she who pampered us, she whom we reminded of grand children and great grand children who lived too far away.

The Topes' backyard was like nowhere you'd ever expect to see in a city. We lived what is now about a half-mile from Lenox Mall and Georgia 400, a massive highway that my mother spent most of my childhood petitioning against the creation of. We lived in the heart of Atlanta, near everything, in a wilderness amidst an ever-growing urban surrounding. Yet Mrs. Tope lived in a backwoods way, her home looking like one you'd encounter in the mountains or in rural southern Georgia, like one most of you have never encountered.

In the front yard, rusted out old cars lay at random angles beneath her magnolias. There was no organization to it; they sat where they fit. In the back yard, long rows of vegetables grew; amidst them stood metal trash bins like bums build fires in, except these were filled with rainwater and seemed to be there for decoration or perhaps, like the cars, just for safe keeping; alongside them lay rubber tires, from the center of which grew the leafy stems of tomato plants.

Dirt paths ran across and through the garden, and one of them passed straight from the door in the fence to my yard to the door in the fence to Louise's. In the middle of this path, facing the vegetables, Louise and I would finish a rendezvous or meet up for the next one. We would sit on a wooden bench—probably just a wooden log dropped there and never gotten back to—and we'd whisper the things little girls have to whisper about. Once we ate cherries there, and I cherished that, for I was eating cherries with Louise Cherry under a cherry tree. Once we fell prisoner to my brother there, for he had laid a trap for us, the kind you'd use if hunting small animals—he'd dug a hole in the dirt, criss-crossed it with fragile branches, and covered it with leaves. We fell directly in, to the delight of him and his friends, and we no doubt arouse from it laughing, if bleeding, and grateful to have our favorite spot so nearby to sit in and recover.

Many magical memories unfolded in the realm of those backyards we lived our young lives in; and one of the strongest is one of the simplest, which may be why it so readily came back to me today.

Mrs. Tope had had a young grandson who had passed away, and for his resemblance to her beloved she particularly prized my brother. When she saw him, she'd beckon him inside, and there she would feed him home-made cookies and the sugar candies she kept on the table in the sitting room. I she had less of a connection to but loved no less, and she gave me free reign of the garden, coming down to join me not to interrupt my play but only to feed me. Though for him she was constantly baking, for me she felt the garden was growing; she knew my fondness for her cucumbers, and I remember time and again she would pick them for me, peel them, and let me stand there and eat them. The freshness of vegetables that come out of the ground is always unrivaled; the way they taste a little of the earth and a little of the air, the way they mean summer and sunshine and wellbeing. Today I ate a cucumber bought at a farmer's market and marveled over how much more flavorful it was than any I've had in a long time—perhaps than any I've had since I stopped being Mrs. Tope's neighbor and stopped having my own private stash of them awaiting me in the dirt.