Finding Home in the Landscape of Childhood
Growing up in 1980s Eastern Kentucky, I saw nothing remarkable in the landscape of my small hometown. Clearfield didn’t have any traffic lights or parks or monuments. We had Ledford’s Grocery, where my granny took us after church almost every Sunday and I debated on whether to buy a pack of teaberry gum or to save my quarters until I had enough for a pack of baseball cards. Then there was the church itself: the most impressive building on our side of the railroad tracks, all brick with swirling blue stained glass windows. It was the site of so much childhood boredom, angst, and even joy that I endured privately, silently, as children do.
Aside from the church, the only other gathering place in Clearfield would have been my elementary school, which sat across from my grandparents’ house. That set of grandparents—my mother’s parents—were distinctly different from my father’s parents, who took me to church and lived within shouting distance on the same gravel road as we did. My maternal grandparents had built their house in the 1950s; they had color television and city water, unlike us. Grandma smoked cigarettes and Papaw drank cheap beer every evening after he was done working on cars in his garage for the day. I thought smoking and drinking were sins, but I never thought of them as sinners.
You couldn’t be at Grandma’s house without seeing the elementary school, a sprawling brick building where teachers mostly doted on me and gave me the praise I desperately craved. The enormous playground spread in front of the school like a generous blanket, rich green grass dotted with majestic oaks and maples.
I learned a lot about life on that playground. There were wiffle ball games where I was excited to swing the bat but discovered I wasn’t great at hitting and even worse at running. And when two captains would take turns picking kids to join their kickball teams, I would dread hearing my name called last. Sometimes, I was relieved to discover I wasn’t picked last, but that relief was complicated by how bad I felt for the kid who was. I had already learned a lot about pain, and I didn’t want other people to hurt like I had.
One time in first grade, I was crushed to find my best friend chatting and laughing on the balance beam with another girl. I asked why she didn’t like me anymore and my wise six-year-old friend tried to explain that people can have more than one friend, which I found hard to believe. There didn’t seem to be enough love to go around in my home, and I couldn’t imagine life was different anywhere else.
There was a wild freedom on the swing sets, which brought me so close to flying. The merry-go-round and witch’s hat offered a similar sense of flying, but often resulted in more kids being flung to the ground from the centrifugal force.
Still, we had picnics on the playground at the end of every school year—that glorious day or two when everyone could breathe a sigh of relief and stop trying so hard. I learned to tie white clovers into delicate floral chains. I chased and laughed and sometimes cried over a scraped knee or my wounded heart. I got to be a kid there.
As I wrote Someplace Like Home, a novel inspired by my mother’s life, I realized this playground has been a fixture of the community, and our family, for generations, serving as an anchor for many people in the small town of Clearfield. The rich history of this simple place became more clear as my mother shared her most important and transformative memories to help me write the story of Jenny Caudill, who, like my mother, came of age in the 1970s as the fourth daughter to parents battling generational trauma.
Check out Bobi Conn’s Someplace Like Home here:
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My mother grew up in the house across from the playground, which of course, was a child’s heaven despite having distinctly few safety features at that time. My mother and her siblings took their chances on impossibly high and brutally hot metal slides, with nothing but worn dirt to break their falls. Some of her earliest and fondest memories consist of her sisters walking her to the playground. She remembers other times staring at it wistfully from the living room window, waiting for the older girls to walk home.
As I interviewed family members to help me better understand my mother’s young life, one of my aunts told me about the time my mother was targeted by the local bully, who pushed her down on the playground and wrapped a dead snake around her neck. My aunt proudly recounted how she had rescued my mother and chased the boy home, and to this day in our town she is still known as the girl who beat up boys on the playground (though she assures me she never actually hurt anyone).
During her teen years, my mother snuck cigarettes at the playground after school, positioning herself so my grandmother wouldn’t see. Maybe she also snuck a kiss there. She didn’t sneak alcohol—she was allowed to have drinks at home. I’m sure there’s more she doesn’t remember or decided not to tell me—other triumphs, joys, and sorrows that shaped her, all bound to that simple landscape.
The playground is still there, as is the school. Everything looks smaller now. It looks safer, too—someone even thought to put a fence around the entire perimeter, to keep children from running into the road. My grandparents who lived across the street have both passed away, but my cousin lives in their house and took over the family auto repair business. We don’t gather there on Christmas Eve anymore, though. This house of my childhood is a stranger now, like so many cousins who were playmates until we were suddenly grown, and we realized we didn’t really know each other.
So much has changed but I can see our history still, embedded and imbued in a place most of the world has never heard of.
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A parking lot covers the area where the witch’s hat used to be but I can still see it; I can still feel what it was to fly, hanging onto a metal ring while a taller and stronger kid ran and ran until he flung us into orbit. I usually sat on the old swings facing the road with the mouth of our holler to my left, my grandparents’ house to my right. In those moments, I was free and yet I knew someone would drive me up the holler at the end of the school day, all the way home and into a hell of my father’s making.
I moved away as soon as I could, sure I could find everything I had ever sought and leave my sorrows tucked away in the foothills. My children didn’t attend the same elementary school as I did, but my nieces and nephews went there. They were surrounded as I was by kids who struggled and those who flourished, each in their own unique story but not yet the storyteller.
The next generation of children are living out parts of their lives on the playground now. Do some of them avoid looking toward their houses, to pretend they don’t dread going home? Maybe they climb and swing. I’m sure they cry sometimes. Maybe they’re just like me, and my mother before me: Aching to be loved; frustrated with their limitations; wishing they could fly away.