My brother and I spent our earliest years, for me, my first twelve years, on a dead-end street named Talmadge Avenue in North Park, a section of Rockford, Illinois–some eighty or ninety miles west of Chicago, some dozen miles south of Wisconsin’s border. Maybe a dozen houses were on the street. Maybe a couple-dozen kids in four or five families.
There were a couple of vacant lots across from our house and a little more toward the dead end of the street. Every summer these grew to prairie because no one cared for them. They grew waist-high in grass and wild-flowers, burrs and snakeweed.
All we kids in the neighborhood built elaborate forts in the grass by lying down and rolling out circular rooms of flattened grass. Over a course of days, we’d roll out a wild-west of circles, we flattened paths between them. We spent hours playing in this maze we created. We played “cowboys and indians” We were informed by the television shows we watched in the evenings with our families. We had a trading post. We would have great wars with murderous raids, then pretend-smoke the peace-pipe. When we sat “indian style” in our circles, the grass was higher than our heads.
I don’t recall how it came to be, whether everyone had been called to lunch by their Moms, or whether we had merely grown tired of each other and wandered off to do other things. I don’t know where my brother might have gotten off to, but occasionally I would find myself alone in the fort, lying on my back, encircled, the wall of grass gently moved by small breezes. Me, shading my face from a bright, warm sun with one of a series of books I had. “You Are There with Winston Churchill….with Thomas Alva Edison….with Charles Lindburgh,” reading outside, hidden in the high grass on a quiet summer afternoon, holding a book framed by a sky-blue sky.
