Back to the original purpose...

While in no way forfeiting this war, I refuse to allow it to fully disrupt the noble origins of this blog.  In order to accomplish this, I'm posting a creative writing assignment I turned in today.

The assignment had two parts.  The first was to describe a place that had some kind of significance to you.  Not to tell a story, just describe it.  The second part was to actually tell the story in this now fleshed out area.  While the options for places that are important to me are countless, this is what I picked.


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Part One

I grew up in a cabin in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  My parents lived there, tucked away about a mile off East Brainerd Road, until they got divorced when I was six.  My mom decided to move to a townhouse in a neighborhood a few miles closer to the actual hub of civilization.  Whereas before we had one family that lived nearby (About five minutes of hiking through woods), we were now surrounded by other families.

The neighborhood was a short drive from Hamilton Place Mall, an area that was just entering a phase of what continues to be a constantly expanding part of town, and a slightly longer drive to downtown Chattanooga.  Across the street was a church with a terrifying (to a little kid) depiction of Jesus hanging from the cross.  Next door was a Subway, and the ultimate responsibility to the adventurous 9 year old was to ride a bike all the way down there, buy subs for my mom, sister and myself, and make it back without tipping over.

My mom chose the neighborhood because it had a lot of kids for my sister and I to play with.  This was true, but it was also a “stopping point” type of neighborhood.  People rented for a year or two and moved on.  We didn’t.  We lived there for around six years, and by the time we left, it was almost devoid of playmates.

When we moved in, next door was a forest.  The road continued, and on the left side were apartments, but the right was all forest.  It was later cut down to build more cheap homes, but for a few years, it was the place where kids shoes were muddied and imagined adventures played out.  Deep within was a lake.  A swamp, really, but we called it a lake.  In the winter it would freeze over just enough to give the impression that it was solid enough to slide across.  It wasn’t, although my mom’s mood to my frozen pants and chattering teeth was fiery enough to make up for my fall.

There was a cat that roamed the neighborhood.  An outdoor, grey striped warrior named Boo-boo due to the constant marks of battle on him.  He was there before we arrived as a sort of neighborhood cat.  There were about five families that kept food, water, and a bed out for him.  My mom, a lover of cats, joined the cause.  When we left, we were the only family still feeding him, so we formally adopted him and took him with us.  Probably the toughest, most capable, most loving cat I’ve ever seen, I always imagined him as a noble warrior or samurai: intelligent, composed, confident, and fully able to take care of himself in any situation.  The entire neighborhood was his domain and he knew it.

 

Part Two

This neighborhood, unnamed but residing on Stratton Place, drastically changed during our stay there.  The place changed, the people changed, and the atmosphere changed.  The changes, be they for better or worse, it taught a lesson to me about treasuring memories.

I already mentioned the forest next to my mom’s townhouse.  It wasn’t a terribly attractive forest filled with tall trees, pine needles carpeting the soil, and a soft, green light permeating.  It was a scraggly, dense cluster of thin, wispy trees, bushes, weeds, and ivy.  Demolishing it, as the neighborhood owner eventually did, was removing an eyesore and a great business move.  As kids, we hated them for it.

The denseness of the forest made it a fortress.  The trees and bushes worked together to build walls surrounding it.  There was an easy path in, but even for seven to ten year old kids, we had to hunch over to get through.  A winding path led us to a clearing in the center, where there was, inexplicably, a decaying old tool bench.  The sky opened up above letting in light, and we kids would gather around the table and plan things we would build in the forest with our rusty screwdriver and brittle hammer.  While the actual construction never got further than me ruining a steak knife from my mom’s kitchen while trying to cut a limb out of a tree, the idea and knowledge that when we got older we’d have an awesome tree fort filled us with excitement.  This was our base; our war room.

And then, one day, a sneak attack destroyed our base.  It seemed to happen overnight.  One day we were playing in our forest and the next day over half of it was being loaded into a truck to be sent for scrap lumber.  I remember very clearly watching as some of the larger trees, the foundations of legitimacy for this forest, were sawed down.  Flocks of birds fled, squirrels were displaced, and I sympathized with them.  I had lost half of my home, too.  My mom tells me I cried, but I refuse to admit it.

Construction started within a week.  Initially it was nothing special, mostly just bulldozing and digging for a while.  But this was also the origins of our guerrilla movement.  We took to organized resistance, waiting until after they got off work to abscond with the little marker flags, write angry notes in cement, and carve curses on the wood.  We thought we were really getting to them, although there was no evidence to support that.

Construction finished months later.  The neighborhood of townhouses and apartments now had full fledged houses, although they didn’t fit with the rest of the neighborhood.  Cookie cutter design, no trees in (very small) yards, and a sense of permanence that the rest of the neighborhood lacked characterized them.  People moved into those homes to settle down, and that divided them from the rest of us.  I remember this period as the time when the other kids started moving away, and I never met any kids, if there were any, from the new houses.

I don’t know what ever happened to the decaying old tool bench.  It disappeared in the first day or two of construction, probably just dumped off at a landfill.  I really hope that the marker notes, a splash of color on the dilapidated old wood, caused someone to think about what that place meant to us.  The loss of our headquarters heralded the destruction of the club of neighborhood kids.