Crops of Stones and Solitude

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened a month or two before my fourth birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

We called the farmhouse our "House in Shirley" even though Shirley was two miles east of where our long driveway met Leominster Road. The location is still just about as isolated as ever (from the point of view of a four-year old), as the recent aerial image below shows. Leominster Road runs along the bottom of the image and north is up. [Image stolen from the site of an interstellar corporation. The Harkonnens work for me, though they know it not.]


The image shows a railroad terminus (you can see a line of freight cars bending down the tracks from the north.) The structure in the middle of the picture is just about exactly where our house stood. The road leading from that to Leominster Road follows the exact same path as our 800 foot driveway, but appears to have been widened. Of course there were no railroad tracks back in 1953. In fact the woods to the east came right up to the house and so did the woods to the north.

An examination of the business listings near Shirley indicates that the unworked farm we lived on has since become a gravel mine, and we are looking at the site where the gravel is loaded onto freight cars to be hauled out.

It's fitting, because the old farmer who gave the land up once told me that his best crop was rocks. The land grew new rocks every year, pushed up by the cycle of freezes and thaws.

Other than that little change of the gravel mine most everything else is familiar. Oh yes, there is one other big difference. The house where the old farmer lived with his wife should be off to our left and on the south side of Leominster Road. It's gone.

Well, the point of showing it is, to see the isolation. Our time there was, for me, especially for the first year, a crucible of social isolation. I spent hours and hours every day playing by myself. I had a play room upstairs in addition to my bedroom. For most of the first year, when we had poor weather, I was expected to spend all my time alone in the play room, out of my Mother's hair. During good weather I could go out, and wander, as long as I stayed by the house or the driveway.

It's to this extended isolation that I attribute my skill at amusing myself endlessly without requiring any help from other people. I never feel lonely, only alone. Solitude is an ocean I've learned to swim, I've spent months and years there, and if circumstances toss me back in, I'm at home in it.