I grew up on a cul-de-sac—a street that stretches into a spoon shape, the end rounded like the mouth of a river—and for that, I consider myself lucky. The dead-end was designed to limit residential traffic and children-at-play casualties, but for my corner of the neighborhood, it was the anointed (and preferred) rendezvous spot.
My neighbors and I would spend afternoons riding our bikes within the dizzying confines of the cul-de-sac’s curvature, melting like popsicles in the sickly summer heat. When that became banal, we would hunch over the asphalt with chalk pressed into our palms and draw bike paths that covered the entire stretch of the street. We drew intersections, grocery stores and a gas station for added effect. We lovingly christened it “Kid’s Town” and rode within its chalked outlines until the rain would come and wash it away.
Our parents liked to sequester themselves to a single driveway, clutching beers, gossiping noisily about whichever adult was missing from the festivities that day and watching our various antics from afar. Brisk evenings were usually reserved for watching scary movies on a clunky VCR-player in the swelling darkness, folding chairs pulled haphazardly around the television in a make-shift, movie theater set-up.
There were eight houses that rested on our street. While the adults were all relatively the same age, the kids varied in maturity–often, we’d self-segregate into different age cohorts, older versus younger. My clique contained my older sister Pheiffer and our neighbors, Sydney and Blake. Sydney lived across the cul-de-sac and was decidedly the most eccentric of our group. Once, after we mashed in her doorbell repeatedly to request her presence outside, she answered the door in nothing but a t-shirt and a pair of Barbie underwear, her demeanor nonchalant and unbothered.
Blake, who lived directly next door to me and was the oldest of our bunch, was the ringleader. When bad weather or boredom would force us inside the walls of someone’s home, it was always in Blake’s house that we’d find ourselves. We’d crowd around his Macintosh computer to giggle at YouTube videos and play Super Smash Brothers for hours on the floor of his basement. Before games like Cards Against Humanity existed, Blake showed us how to make Apples to Apples as crude and ridiculous as possible—our sense of humor was absurd but we were unquestionably creative. I resented when dusk would fall upon the windows of Blake’s house because the darkened rooms indicated my need to return home for dinner and compulsory family time. I’d collect my shoes, call a goodbye over my shoulder and count the hours until I could see my neighbors once again.
Our cul-de-sac was electric. Relentless excitement hung in the air like the oxygen which sustained us, and we clung to every moment spent on the prickly asphalt that poked and burned our feet. I moved away from the cul-de-sac when I was roughly eleven years old, but I returned infrequently with my family for special occasions. Our street was undeniably different—others had come and gone since our departure and the younger cohort was now in the throes of high school angst—but it still felt like I was home.
Or whatever semblance of home the cul-de-sac represented for me, because clinging to and idealizing the past isn’t necessarily admirable (no offense, Jay Gatsby). I remember a particularly awkward return to our street for a Fourth of July celebration, the sweltering summer atmosphere not unlike how it was when I was a child. Pheiffer and I approached Blake’s mom and eagerly asked her where he was–we could hardly wait to share memories and laugh about inside jokes over a riveting round of card games. She directed us to their basement, and when we descended the stairs we were met with five different gazes. Blake had invited his friends over to hang out and they were sprawled across his couch, smoking cigarettes with heavy-lidded eyes.
I recoiled, upset that our once sacred space was being overrun by people who couldn’t begin to appreciate its significance. We murmured hellos and quickly followed them with goodbyes, fleeing the scene before we could realize how much it bothered us. We weren’t children anymore, no longer forced to be friends and get along because of proximity and convenience, and it hurt. We had diverged on radically different paths, some for better and some for worse, but the cul-de-sac didn’t bring us back together like I always thought—or hoped—it would.
I can’t feel resentful, though. In life, we are rarely provided with places that are so overwhelmingly formative to our existence (educational institutions excluded) that impact and change us so deeply. I’m mostly writing this because Blake died two weeks ago. He was 21 years old. I read his obituary online in one of my classes, and when I saw a picture of us as children attached in the photo gallery, I could barely restrain my tears. I used think about the cul-de-sac every now and then, but I’ve been relishing in my childhood every day since he died. Our corner of the earth might have faded and changed after I knew it, but I’ll always have our cul-de-sac in my memories. And for that, I consider myself lucky.
Nina Wilder is a Trinity first-year and Recess staff writer.
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