A Tale of the Tree Streets

We moved there when I was six. They said it had once been acres of orchards, remaining now only in memory and a few remaining fruit trees here and there. My parents bought a small house on Cedar, and with that, gave me a lifetime of memories. Elementary school, junior high, high school. Then a newer home on a new tree street, and college. Later my parents built their final home on Locust where they welcomed grandbabies, watched them grow, and housed them when it was their turn for college.

Now the time has come to move family out and rent the home to strangers. How can we do that? They won't know about the first little house on Cedar. We had neighbors there, the Finlaysons, who had a traveling carnival every summer. And every spring as they cleaned and repaired their equipment to get ready for a new season, every child in the tree streets got a free ride on the ferris wheel. Sometimes going around and around for so long it seemed like hours, breeze blowing through our hair, popsicles melting and staining our shirts and shorts - time disappeared until one by one the mothers came out on their porches to holler their children home for dinner. And then after dinner, and dishes, we left again, screen doors slamming, to run through the neighborhood playing hide and seek, made all the more exciting in the darkness.

There were no fences then. We "cut through" wherever we needed to make the trip shorter; children were allowed this privilege. We all walked wherever we went, so why not? Even in high school I cut through the Crandalls, through the Bernhards, through the Bullocks, climbed a tree and hopped a fence into the Larsens' back yard where Sara, my best friend, lived. Then we'd walk the "long way" past the Clarks, her cousins. And back down Cherry Lane, past the Bowdens, and oh, so many more familiar names.

We rollerskated as kids with those turn-key roller skates - all the way south on Cherry Lane and around past theHeatons and the Hartvigsens, down the hill onto Apple. Scary corner. If you weren't in control you could fall, and nobody had helmets and knee pads. We just learned to head for the nearest patch of grass if we felt a fall coming on. And we biked up and down the tree streets and around the blocks and past the canal on Birch. Sometimes we even went tubing through the canal when it still ran through Heritage Halls. We could stop in to Carson's Market for a treat, but Mr. Carson didn't like kids much. We ran errands there for our moms, but didn't hang around.

When I married and moved away I loved taking my own children to visit Grandma and Grandpa on Locust. There they met their cousins and ran to play in the orchard behind the house. On the 4th of July we had a "cookout" with hamburgers and hotdogs and games, and then always sleepy children waiting impatiently in deck chairs as we looked toward the stadium, only a mile away as the crow flies, to watch the fireworks before heading home. When the oldest cousins were teens at one of these midsummer gatherings, they were trying out all the latest appreciative adjectives for each new display in the sky: Awesome! Rad! Sweet! We asked my dad, What did you say during World War II when you saw fireworks like these? His answer? DUCK!

And now he's gone and my mom is living close to me where it's now my turn to take care of her after all her many years of taking care of all of us. But how can there not be a Dunn, or a descendant of a Dunn, in the tree streets? We buried treasure there along ditch banks, thinking no one would ever find it - not even thinking, really, that we would ever grow up. But we did. And there is treasure there. But it's not buried. It's in every leaf of the maple trees that line the streets; every bump in the sidewalk that we walked, skated, and biked; every window that still lights with friendly light each evening. There is something magical there that will never leave.

It may be the end of an era for the Dunns, and maybe it's time to share that magic with someone else. But I know, and my mother knows, and my brother knows, and our children know that something special was ours for a while -- and really, always will be.