The Perils of Eden

It could be that things were not really better in the days of my childhood.  Memory is selective, and I think of summertime games of kick-the-can as the sunshine dimmed into twilight and the evening star hung over Frawley’s Mountain, which is a hill of sand left by a melting glacier in a past even more remote than the one of which I write. 

Frawley’s was a place of pasture and woods adjacent to trout pools and not far from Poor House Pond.  It was an area where we children played endless games of “guns,” named for the cap pistols or simple bent sticks with which we were armed.  We died agonizing deaths and then jumped up to fight again. 

Now the paths upon which we ran have grown up to saplings, and the saplings have become trees.  You no longer hear the voices of children in the woods.  Poor House Pond has become Jenny Pond and is surrounded by a park where children come supervised by adults.  The picturesque Victorian almshouse is gone, and the old trees that were cut down by the landscaper have been replaced by planted trees that are slowly gaining dignity of their own. 

No one thought we kids were in peril as we roamed those almost primeval woods, but perhaps we were.  It’s easy to think that predators are a modern plague, but I was once at a dinner party where eight out of ten diners related that they had either been abused as children or had escaped attempts at abuse.  I was one of the remaining two and blushed to admit I must have been an ugly duckling whom even perverts scorned. 

Possibly there is simply more news of such attacks, and parents are more careful now.  Perhaps it was never safe to be hiding behind bushes in the warm darkness or ranging woodland paths far from any house.  Being one of the exceptions protected by a guardian angel or luck or lack of sex appeal, I look back nostalgically to a time when the whole town seemed an extension of my back yard and I was free to roam and explore.  Maybe my freedom was only the naivety of my watchers, but it was delicious nonetheless. 

On the other hand I’m not letting my grandchildren out of my sight.