WILMINGTON — Concord, N.H., in 1949 was a perfect town for my size. It had a soul, and it was a friend you could trust.
From where I lived, Ma would send me to the corner store with a dollar or two for something, and Dad would give me a quarter later in the day after he came home from work to run to the same store and pick up a pack of Old Golds. There was never any worry about my safety even though I was barely 7.
Come Saturday, for a half a buck I could walk, unaccompanied, to the theater and have a heck of a good afternoon.
Concord in the late 1940s did have some big trees and occasional parks where I would go with the old man on summer afternoons and watch him and his brothers play baseball.
There were some backyard lawns; I had one next to where I lived. I played on it and tried not to step in the dog poo or more dangerous stuff that folks discarded.
Concord had only three things that scared the living hell out of me: fire stations, manhole covers, and Catholic churches. Not necessarily in that order.
I always dreaded walking by the fire station because I was afraid that the doors would suddenly slam open and I would be run over by dozens of siren-screaming, red-metal firetrucks. I think someone told me a story of one little boy this terrible thing happened to. Like many urban legends, it probably held a tiny amount of truth.
Manhole covers were easy to avoid. As long as I didn't step on one, I wouldn't be hurt if, for some ungodly reason, it decided to explode then and there, carrying me with it.
Catholic churches? Well, I walked by them occasionally on my way to school. The doors were open sometimes, and the inside looked dark. And spooky. And full of hooded chanting figures with flickering candles. And there was a guy stapled to a piece of wood on the wall.
I had this vision of dozens of dark-cloaked Catholics rushing from the church to grab a little Baptist boy and carry him back inside to do heaven-knows-what with him.
To say I had an imagination is putting it mildly.
Concord did lack some things, like grass, gently rolling hills, acres of wildflowers, pasturelands, oceans of blueberry, raspberry, and blackberry bushes, tall and monumental granite cliffs, and beautiful blue skies.
I just saw a lot of asphalt, concrete, cement, tarpaper, and house lots filled with packed, brown dirt.
But that was okay.
* * *
So imagine my surprise one day when my dad said to me, “We're going to move to Vermont.”
He smiled. My mother didn't. My little sister Candy went along with it.
“Doesn't that sound like fun?” he continued. “You can have a room of your own up in the attic, and you can paint it any color you want.”
I wasn't sure how I felt about it. But I didn't have a lot of friends, so I guess I could make some new ones, I thought. I would get to go to another school. It was a small town. Dad would have a better job and would make a little better salary. I thought it might be okay.
We moved in the summer of 1950 or 1951. It seemed like an awfully long drive from Concord, N.H., to Wilmington.
But I did get to paint the attic room any color I wanted. I picked a light bluish-green color because it looked like the sea, and I pictured myself living in a glass dome under the ocean.
The room even had a normal-sized outside window tipped at a 60-degree angle to follow the lower roof line, and I could slide it open or closed. Now, that was cool.
* * *
But the real thrill came after the first day or so. My folks said that if I wanted, I could explore the hill behind our big, sprawling, white, 19th-century, connected-architecture farm house.
And the minute I climbed the hill and turned to look, I knew I had found my kingdom.
The hill was precariously steep for about 10 meters from the bottom up; it flattened out a bit, but still rose for another 50 meters or so until it was looped by a stone wall with a section of the wall opened. Then the hill continued its upward race, now very steep and studded with atlas-sized boulders, granite bulwarks, and crumbling stone ramparts.
The landscape pushed farther up until it came to a lazy stop on a treeless highland tabletop; the grass whispering with the wind and foaming and billowing like water around my legs.
As I look back now, I realize it was something akin to Adam awakening after God breathed life into inanimate clay and he caught his first glimpse of Eden.
The smell was something I had never known. It was clear and clean and filled with the living odor of crushed wild thyme, lavender, clover, goldenrod, raw grass, and freedom!
I looked all around, a full 360 degrees.
There was green everywhere, stitched together with ancient stone walls, brush, chokecherry bushes, birch, walnut, maples, and crab apple trees with pink flowers bursting from each branch.
And hills. So many hills with tiny white farms and a distant steeple.
I sat on an outcropping of warm, gray stone, etched with lichen and moss. I didn't know stone could be so warm. I lay face-down on it and rested my head. It became an instant friend. My senses were opened, and I felt so alive.
* * *
For a half dozen years, that hill and all that lay beyond became my place to go when I wanted to be alone. To be at peace.
The springs brought life to my kingdom; the summer days hanging warm and soft about the rim, carrying the sounds of wild birds, doves, thrushes, larks, and goldfinch.
The fall was a magic time when the hills became colored bedspreads for a giant. They glowed with so many colors, each with subtle tones of reds, orange, yellow, brown, and rust.
And the winters provided the Sebring International Raceway of sledding. The Nuremburg Ring of Flexible Flyers. You could slide forever on that distant hill. Forever!
That first spring, I roamed the hills from one green Eden to another, sometimes passing milk cows that patiently moved in the cool of the shade and drank from incredibly clean and clear streams of water that sprung from hillsides to gather and splash over rocks to the Brown Brook.
I explored and saw things I had never imagined existed.
Each day thereafter, I rushed from the breakfast table to push farther up and in. And when I did, I saw miracles that my time in the city had never prepared me for.
There were deep copses of trees, with noontime shadows that were black and limned with green or blues, little caves in the hillsides made as mighty rocks dropped from a tired and beaten glacier as it retreated north thousands of years before, and dozens of pools of clear water that froze my bare feet but felt so good after miles of hiking.
My imagination took me everywhere on those hills.
I would pretend to be Ethan Allen, and I would hunt Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne's Redcoats on that hill, using a large goldenrod with a crook in the center as a Brown Bess flintlock rifle.
Or a Native American with a stout stick for a bow and several golden rods shoved down the back of my shirt for my quiver.
On that hill behind my house in Wilmington, Robin Hood and his Merry Men toasted their absent King, Richard the Lionheart, and drank make-believe nut-brown ale and split arrows as they laughed at the Sheriff of Nottingham's futile efforts to round up the noble archer and his jolly band of rogues.
* * *
Some dozen or so years later, I started driving in Laconia, N.H. one summer afternoon with my wife and kids, and I got onto Route 9 west and drove all the way to Wilmington.
Something was pushing at me.
Something was telling me to go back to that hill. That things would be okay if I got there. It was like a fire in me. It consumed me beyond the point of rationality until I drove into the yard of my old house and fairly leapt out the door of the car, followed by my precious little daughter Lizzie.
“Wait for me, daddy,” she cried, but I was pulled up that hill, now overgrown with weeds and new-growth trees. I ran to the top, my little girl trying to catch up to me.
And when I got to the top I stopped. My kingdom had been swallowed by time.
There was, indeed, no going home again. I picked up my daughter and slowly started down.
Sometimes it is best to leave the memories where they rest.
I travel Route 9 at least once a year to visit relatives in New York and I drive through town, and glance at the hill, now a tiny, tall forest of trees, and I remember that first spring.
It took my breath away and left Eden in its place.