Today, age 79, I had lunch at Maritsa's which is a couple of blocks from where as a junior high school student, I had lunch with friends at a place called Shucks. There was a juke box and a dance floor in the room adjoining the conter where we ordered vanilla cokes and burgers and fries. Around the edge of the dance floor there were booths. We did a lot of line dances in those days, the 'stroll' is the one I remember best.
After I left Maritsa's, I passed what was the Burlington County Trust Bank, now for sale, where at 17, I had my first bank account because that was the year I had my first full time job right of high school at W. B. Saunders Publishing Company on Washington Square in Philadelphia. I paid board and the rest went into he bank or for bus fare. I loved watching that bank balance rise. When I left home, I had $2000.
Next, I passed our old house, the last one we had as a family, on Linwood Ave. next door to what was St. John's Episcopal Church where my mother was a faithful parishoner and ran the church suppers and my father mowed he lawn and did painting and some repairs. He made a stained glass "Mother's Day Window" for the chrch. My daughter was baptised there. It is now a Buddhist Temple.
I also passed the Congregational Church which is where I attended as a teen and where there was a pastor who had lost some fingers during his missionary days.
Further down the road, I turned onto Collins Lane and to the development our family moved into our first New Jersey home in the prosperous 1950's. It was a brand new house, and at first, we had a picnic table and benches for dining room furniture. Over the years, we had a large vegetable garden on the hill out back that bordered the corn field of the farmer who still ran a farm up there. It is a baseball field now. My parents gave me the best room in the house, upstairs front room with a large picture window. When I was away in camp one summer, they redecorated it beautifully with pink check walpaper, a white vanity with an organdy skirt, white louvered doors on the closet. I pitched a totally ungrateful fit because they had invaded my private space and transformed it without my having any say in the matter. I am, to this day, ashamed at my ingratitude after all their work and for crushing their anticipation of my happiness at their effort. It makes me cry and I wish I could apologize.
Around the Roland Avenue circle is the Pennsauken Creek that was in those days so polluted by overflow of sewage from the local sewer plant, which had not been updated to accommodate the new development, that 14 children got hepatitus from swimming in it. Boats used to float down the creek from the Delaware and other parts far away after storms and we would paddle around in them until they sank or left again on their mysterious journeys. I remember the water was black and giant dark green water plants with platter sized leathery leaves grew in it off long pale pipe stems from the black velvety mud. To my city child's mind, this was a jungle wonderland of plants and water, animals and birds. We'd had one tree on our city street and the only water we saw was rain water flowing in the gutters after a storm, or coming out of the fire hydrant in summer when young rule breakers opened the hydrants for us kids to run through.
Past the next development of modest bungalows where my first best friend Barbara D'Arcangelo lived, I reach what used to be the little white bridge with our initials carved in it, but which is now a metal railing bridge over the Pennsauken Creek. I drive by the little evergreen forest in the fenced off area around a municipal plant of some kind. We would sneak into the woods there and I remember the intoxicating fragrance of evergreens in summer sun and the wonderful pine cones all over the forest floor. Just beyond that forest was another spot on the Pennsauken Creek where we swam and there was a thick knotted rope tied to a tree branch that kids would hold onto and swing out over the creek and then fall into the water. I didn't do that - not brave that way.
Next I cross Haddonfield Road where the candy factory used to be on the corner with a girl, dressed in antebellum hoop skirt and sun bonnet, sat on a swing to lure the eyes of drivers over to the store to come in and buy candy.
Down the road into Pennsauken, I pass the high school where my first and deepest love had been a student. I was besotted by him, adoring, entranced, and I am glad now that i had a chance to know what that kind of romantic love feels like because now that I am old, I know that not everyone has that experience. It ended badly but I have no regrets. Even after all the ill will and bad feelings, as I drive down that familiar road that we drove so often in his sports car from his house to mine and back, I feel a longing for him and I wish we could be in contact but I have over the 40n years since our divorce, reconciled myself that he is as dangerous as a poisoned well
I pass the Merchantville Train Station where I have been showing my paintings in group shows for the past 10 years. I have three flower paintings there now. Down Center Street over the intersection, I pass my old high school. There are kids in the playing fields and it reminds me of how much I hated hockey and lacrosse - all that running up and down and those dangerous sticks!
Finally, I am up and over Route 38 and passing the Cooper River where my then-husband and I bought our first house and all the kinds of adventures and bad experiences relating to that river.
There is TD Bank where I turn on White Horse Pike, where over the years I have made deposits to my daughter's bank account for holiday gifts. Up around Walmart on the corner of the Black Horse Pike and through the back streets of my town to my little bungalow and the big beautiful trees of my little woods.
I contemplate what it means to grow up and live in the same place all your life, the memories built and the landmarks to them. There is an ivisible tie of love and longing and memory that accompanies these landmarks and the thought of people I have loved who are gone or dead now.
Here is the driveway and the daffodills and the porch and soon, the door is open and the happy big cream colored dog is wagging her tail in joy and greeting.
My yard looks wonderful because I just signed up for a $900 clean-up from a landscape company that will be taking care of my yard from now on. How I used to love to run the big Toro Mulch Mower I bought to grind up the leaves for nourishment for the grass. Up and down making green stripes in the brown leaves, transforming the yard. I guess I was in my 60's when I couldn't do it anymore. I miss my intimate relationship with the yard and plan this year to walk around the yard even if I can't do the mowing anymore.
This is, in fact, my 80th year even though I had my 79th birthday and I have realized long since, that I am OLD. My lunch friend and I were talking about that today and all the things we used to do that we can no longer do but also all the things we can still do and enjoy doing. She still hikes and I write and paint. We are both happy and we have both had long, interesting, adventurous and productive lives. Being old is a challenge but it is also beautiful.
Happy Trails, Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com
