In 1967 I was a ten years old kid living in rural Arizona. We spent a lot of time outdoors. The house my parents built, with their own four hands, was a solitary dwelling. There were neighbors but we couldn't see them from where we lived. Though the holding my parents purchased and named “Lizard Acres” was only two acres of land, from a kids point of view we were the owners of thousands of open land. We ran wild in the unfenced high desert glory, screaming and yelling to our hearts content. We took regular excursions by foot and bike down the network of dirt roads that crossed the high desert around us.
Children played outside a lot then and nobody I knew had play structures. But we didn’t need them because we had plants, rocks and a vastness of dirt. There were great winds we called ‘tumbleweed storms’, that brought in piles of tumbleweeds. We built forts out of the big prickly branches. Our most favored play spot was the depths of a creek that ran only when the snow melted in the Huachucha Mountains. I found it particularly exciting to wade in the spot where it ran across the middle of the dirt road that ran past our house. It was softer there then the rocky stretch that actually crossed our land. We also had the impression we were less likely to step on the snakes and tarantulas we always had to be cautious of, when we turned over stones. I think now that they would probably have avoided the cold snow-melt water.
The job market for computer programmers dried up when the civil service contract at Fort Huachuaca wasn’t renewed. My father landed a new job in Southern California. Our new town was nothing like the rural fastness of Arizona. Houses were built close together and when my sister and I shouted out during our time together, my mother had to remind us to be quiet because we had neighbors living right next door.
Suburban life was exciting though. There with paved roads with buttons you pushed to inform the light signal that a pedestrian had arrived. (In fact I can remember learning the word ‘pedestrian’ the first day I started in my new classroom.) We could walk a long two blocks to a bus and arrive at a movie theatre or shopping mall thirty or forty minutes later. It was heady stuff for a sixteen year old and her ten year-old kid sister.
Southern California offered work not only to my father, but also my sister. There was a Baskin Robbins ice cream store with numerous flavors and, just as generous then as she is now, she bought me regular treats with the money she made baby-sitting.
I started to play indoors more often, but sometimes my big sister took me on a walking excursion. They were nothing like our wild rambles in Arizona but one day she took me to the edge of a golf course she’d found. Though we couldn’t walk on the manicured grass, we could hangout under the tall shady trees that ringed the course. Back in Lizard Acres the biggest trees we’d even seen had been the mesquites that grew along our creek. Here there were real tall trees that I’d only seen in books. The eucalyptus were my favorites. They had a lovely resin’y smell. Their bark peeled off and you could carry pieces of it home. Best of all, they produced sticky seed pods that my sister gathered up and carried home, where she strung them on a necklace using a heavy upholstery needle and carpet thread. The necklace smelled like heaven.
One of the reasons my parents had wanted to land a job for my father in California, was the system of affordable public universities. I missed my big sister terribly when she went off to U.C.S.D. in the fall of 1968. One day I found the eucalyptus pods she’d strung together and left behind. The sticky seed pods had each opened up in a chain of tiny feathery bloom, and the necklace still smelled like heaven.
