My mother spent her childhood in Lynn, Massachusetts. I took her back there one day — summer or fall, I forget which — and invited her to give me a tour of her old neighborhoods. She was born in 1903. This was probably 1975.
Lynn became a hard-scrabble city over the course of the Twentieth Century; industrial, with many poor neighorhoods. But mom remembered a happy, promising place.
At one point, she directed me to a particular street corner at the foot of a hill.
She was remembering being about ten years old and her mother letting her go out after dinner for one last ride on her sled. She would go down the little hill at the base of which we sat paused and idling in my car a century later. There was no one around; there had been no one around when mom took her ride — a thrilling solitary trip to the bottom.
The old neighborhood had gone slightly to seed. A century of snow had been plowed successively into grimy piles bordering scarred, patched and broken macadam. (So, if my memory is correct, this would be winter.)
But mom’s memory was pristine and inviolet — a scene in the crystal ball snow-shaker — of standing by her sled in the snow-silent twilight, hearing, far off, the barking of a dog.
She never forgot it. I never forgot her telling me about it.
A winter memory.
19 Cent Notebook 