Memories In The Strangest Places

There are so many things that can trigger a memory. A snippet of a song, a photograph, a scent - even a long-absent voice on a telephone, or an old television show or movie. Certainly places hold memories for us all. But when I think of my memories, I would never have thought that so many poignant memories could be aroused by a hedge.

For as long as I have lived in my house - the home my parents purchased and moved into when I was a mere year old, and where I reside today along with my mother - there was a tall, everygreen hedge along the western border of our property and our neighbors. As I grew up, this hedge was the demarkation line between ourselves and our neighbors, the Parsells. Linda was my good friend for a while and we spent summers in her pool beneath a maple tree. The Parsells moved on decades ago, and several families came and went in the house. The hedge grew a bit taller, the maple did too, and time passed.

I moved out of my house and lived in Manhattan for ten years while pursuing my career as a singer and actress. I visited often and things changed very little in our yard.

When I returned home in 1995 to aid my Mother whose health was deteriorating and who also was caring for my elderly grandmother and my mentally handicapped brother, I began to make changes to the yard. Grass slowly disappeared as I appropriated the property for garden patches. I planted trees, and bushes and, because the neighbors who were living in the corner house at the time were unpleasant, inconsiderate and possessed of children who roamed at will, I planted some Leyland Cypress, extending the long hedge that kept the kids out and kept my privacy.

Then the people living there chopped down the maple tree. The majestic old tree that had shaded my home was gone and in its place an ugly view of the little no-neck monster children and their garbage riddled backyard, including a blue plastic child's pool that was tossed on the roof of the garage and remained there.

But the hedge remained. Dark green, with a few other weed bushes nestled within, such as the mock orange tree that peeked out, it was a great living wall that hid the rest of the neighbors and their property from my site. In October 2001 I built a 90 square foot rock walled raised garden bed with Pennsylvania fieldstone. More bushes, trees, everygreens were planted there, and alongside the picket fence that ran parralel to the wall I planted Souvenier de la Malmaison roses (descendants of the vines planted by Josephine Bonapart at Malmaison in France). I added some asymmetrical slates for a small path and, as is my wont, I allowed violets, creeping vines and other plants to grow along the path which led straight to the shade of the hedge and where, at the end of the path, I put a cement bird bath which, when the branches were laden and the flowers blooming, could just be seen at the end of this fairytale like section of my garden.

I sat in chairs beneath the shade of those trees and I hid from the ugliness of my neighbors and their domestic disputes - which the hedge assisted as well in hiding the screaming and sounds of police intervention.

When the family was evicted and the houes went into foreclosure it was bought at auction. I crossed my fingers that for once, please, no crazy people with hideous children would move in.

Momentarily it seemed my wishes were answered. Until the new owners stripped the backyard to lay an entire cement patio from the street to the property's edge.

And then they ripped out the hedge.

After more than fifty years, I was left staring into a cement yard.

It took them months but they finally replaced the hedge with a pristine, six-foot tall plastic fence. Which is hideous. Blatant, baldly boring and just plain ugly.

I am stuck with trying to find options to now plant some things that can be grown along the fence without being invasive, while still hiding the sight. But while I have been contemplating that chore, I have found myself remembering my life and the hedge.

As a young girl with only one other girl playmate (who had a kidney condition and was sickly often), I played with all the neighborhood boys. My brother, David, Tony, Philip, Dinky and others. We played American soldiers and Nazis (which dates me, I know!), hiding beneath the shadow of the looming hedge, firing our stick rifles and singing the odd, lewd little ditty that ended with "And Goebbels had no balls at all". Heaven help me if I can remember the rest.

The hedge was where my brother lost the tip of his finger when he stuck his hand in the clippers as my father trimmed the hedge (which was not ours but we always took care of trimming our side of it). He and David hunted for the little bit of flesh and, when found, it could not be re-attached so he took it in to school (probably first or second grade) for show-and-tell.

I remember many summers lazying beneath the cool shade of the hedge, lying on freshly mown grass, reading my books, like Johnny Tremayne and Maida. Sundays were especially lazy and I would lie around reading - oblivious to bugs or ants - until called in to watch The Wonderful World of Disney.

My one girlfriend Debby and I would make our escape beneath the hedge and the attendant spirea bushes which for years made an L-shaped wall. The tiny little flowerly snowflakes would fall around us as we would dress our Barbie dolls or divide up our candy purchases (back in the day when a penny really did buy you penny candy).

Years later, at age twenty, when there was a tree branch that had fallen right beside the hedge I chopped it up while 5 months pregnant - a pregnancy that would end through fate's unkind (but perhaps sage) hand a few weeks later.

Shooting forward decades, I hid out there from heat, my Mother, arguments in the house, and the suffocation of burdens that I had voluntarily taken on but which were painful for me as an adult with no other support network.

In recent years I had concoted special places to sit and regroup. Beneath the hedge where the prying eyes of far too many nosy neighbors couldn't find me, where the clamor of the traffic was muffled, and where I could, briefly, forget the worries and woes of financial difficulties, tough family decisions, and the realization that I was a caretaker - am a caretaker - and that the dreams I may have dreamed have not come to pass.

And now I am struck anew by the stark, unfamiliarity of that stretch of property. While there are new vistas - trees for blocks that I was never able to see, more sunshine than the area previously received -- I still feel a sense of forlorn abandonment. My green habitat, my earth-bound friend, is gone. Memories of childhood laughter, remembered books, the sting of tears and the sound of loss - all bound up in a plain green hedge that grew up with me and is now, like other friends and family, gone from my life forever.