Fireblog

Many trees, old friends, were cut down.

There are no more gardens of tomatoes and cabbage outside the buildings. The guava trees, which were such a large part of my childhood, have been removed. It is quiet and serious here. No children, as there always were.

The doors are different--dark and heavy. Gone is the old white wooden door with glass slats. I would look through it at night and see a forest of trees with leaves of gold within the patterns of the frosted glass and the yellow breezeway light.

I look at the doorway that used to be mine. The door is just like every other door. Gone, too, is the Halloween sticker I had stuck above the door when I was seven. It was there last time I had come, only a few years ago.

I picture our building how I remembered, with the golden rain tree casting green shadows on the other side of the breezeway, with the parsley my dad grew spilling onto the bricks, with the old door and the mailboxes. Over by the golden rain tree funny bugs would always appear, shield-shaped bugs with black and orange. And people kept their bikes, beside the two steps up, with a rose that bloomed sometimes growing under a window. Behind the bikes were slabs of cement, all broken and in a pile. A skink lived there.

The only thing unchanged is the two-flight stairway leading to the second story, the stairway where older boys would ride their bikes down, where so many of us cracked our heads. It is steeper than I remembered, and the steps seem smaller.
We headed to the old playground.

Gone is the huge old wooden merry-go-round that stood three feet off the ground.
Gone is the old metal slide and the long, dangerous see-saw, and the metal jungle gyms. They have all been replaced by safe-looking plastic creations--corner-less and ersatz.
We didn't see any children. I pause by the old cement barbeque's where an older kid would light things on fire.

We check on the creek that flows beside the playground. Gone is the old wooden bridge. You can't go that way anymore. Someday I will tell Mirin about when my best friend's dad took us on an expedition up the creek and through the sewers. When he tried to lift the lid of a manhole big roaches fell on us in the dark.

The stump of the soap berry tree...

The apartment of the Russian children...

The place where the persimmon tree stood...

The laundromat, where women would gather, where we used to see the woman from Africa who called my brother "Ivory."

The old gazebo, now a building for the mailboxes, where we used to jump off the roof.

We pass the sloping hill in front of my old home, where we would ride my old red wagon, and sometime roll all the way down.
That was how I got my first bee sting, rolling in the clover.

Boonsri's stinky eggplant bushes....
We called them stink bombs. Even after they moved their eggplant bush stayed for so many years. The maintenance men herbicided it again and again, and it still grew back. Finally they removed the topsoil, and it still grew back. It seemed they had finally defeated it, though.

I stop and look at the apartment where I spent ten years. Gone is the avocado tree my father planted from a seed. It once stretched all the way up to the roof. Gone, too, is the holly tree we used to climb, whose red berries I picked for a wreath one Christmas.

We cross the new sidewalk, new when I was 8, that we weren't allowed to write on. Before that we had only a plank of wood to walk across.

As we head out, I smelled a wonderful smell. It was the smell of someone cooking, and it smelled like fish sauce. I was lost momentarily in nostalgia, running home after a long day of playing, hungry and smelling the different dinners cooking through the windows. At least something hasn't changed.