Finding 35

6. Growing up in Colby Village

Our family was a lot like other families in our neighbourhood.  We moved into a single family home in a brand new neighbourhood when I was just a little over 2 years old. 

My first memory is of our house being built.  We lived almost on the top of the hill, Ashgrove Avenue, just outside of Dartmouth Nova Scotia.  The front lawn was all mud and clay.  Big planks placed on the ground on the muddy clay lead to the front door.  I remember it like an old super 8 film, the colours only slightly faded, everything just a little blurry.  I was wearing some sort of blue jumpsuit thing and had my boots on.  Of course I was walking beside my mom, beside the planks, in the mud.

Growing up in Colby Village was probably no different than growing up in any other 1970’s middle class suburb.  But when I was ten years old, I didn’t really what a suburb was.  I just knew we lived on the second street in the neighbourhood almost on the top of the hill, and there were woods behind our house.

            We used to play in this playground called the ‘Tot Lot’, which must have been built early in the 1970’s.  It was something you would discover as if you were out on a trip of to explore to new worlds.  It was about four baseball fields from our house.  There were these giant telephone-like polls sticking in the ground, holding up a chain suspended bridge, with a lamppost like ladder at one end, with the twenty foot long plank and chain suspended bridge in the middle, and two slides at the other end.  Now these were real slides, the kind with a four-inch lip on the side holding you in.  And it was steep!  It had two swooshes on it.  The Tot-lot also had two sets of swings but it always seemed that the big kids wound one up around the top beam, and one seat was broken, so that left two seats for about four or five kids. 

Like all playgrounds there are remnants of old playground pieces that were broken years ago but never fixed, and signs of decay.  There were two toys that if around today would be banned by a parent community if they saw kids whaling away on a giant metal green slug attached to an industrial sized spring flinging themselves with such force that the metal body would crack the cement stones as it was pitched forwards and back all the while with a seven year holding on two to metal handles and two other kids pushing and pulling to make it go farther.  The goal of riding the green slug was to try to make the slugs head smack into the ground, whilst at the same time trying not to smack your skulls on the slug’s very hard, green metal neck.  It was awesome, then after 30 seconds you would get bored and dizzy.

In our spilt-level house near the top of the hill, we had a backyard that neighboured the woods.  We lived there before the elementary school was built, before they dug out the woods, before they put in two soccer fields, before the erosion and hardship from hundreds of kids climbing trees and breaking off the branches which left the area looking like a shell of it’s former densely wooded self.  It eventually turned into a well-worn path to a couple soccer fields surrounded by a few scraggly looking trees. 

But before all of the use and abuse, as a new subdivision in a wooded area, there are things to explore, hidden play areas and secret forts.  For some a time the kids on my street all knew each other, and sometimes everyone played together.  I remember big games of hide and seek in the summer, where the game spanned three or four back yards and the edge of the woods.  But most of the time, kids seemed to play with each other based on the grade they were in.  As kids grow older, they start forming new friendships with kids of similar interests.  But back in grades one through six, you played with the kids in your class, or the kids on your street. 

What is a playdate?

To the left of our house were the Guans, they were a Chinese family, and our backyards shared the same fence.  It was about four feet high and painted red.  It had alternating 1x6 vertical boards, and it was just high enough that I could stretch my foot up and place it between the boards then I could leap over to Chris’s side.  Chris was the oldest kid; I think he was a year or two younger than me.  He had a younger brother Oliver, and a younger sister Sophie.  We spent a lot of summers playing cowboys and Indians.  Actually I think it was just cowboys.  We were all cowboys which meant that we always ran out of caps!