ocean dreams

My new favorite obsession: Google Earth. Type in an address and - oh, I so love technology - presto, there's a satellite view that zooms in until the rooftop blurs, zooms out until the place is lost, just an arrow on the globe.

I'm so lazy I can't bother with the free download - googeling the address gets me just where I want to be - miles above my old neighborhood, looking down on the woods that surrounded my childhood.

Check it out. (click the satellite button on the map, couldn't figure out how to direct link it.)

My parents spent 27 years in that house, brought me home from the hospital to it and didn't move until I was a couple years out of college. (I haven't lived in one place for longer than three years since I left at 18.) Every inch of those woods was my playground, every curve in the trees my growth. My two favorites - the apple trees at the back edge of the yard, are gone. Before these streets became a cookie-cutter, middle-class subdivision, they were graceful orchards sewn by Johnny Appleseed. Every yard had at least one huge grandmother of an apple tree.

There's no way any of them could still be standing. Funny, even knowing those trees didn't have long, I cry for the vanished sentinels of my past. All the summers dreaming in my crow's nest, my castle, my refuge. Me and the little green apples. Winter's trekking through the woods, ice skates over shoulders, shovel in hand, to Twin Pond. Or, when we were really motivated, all the way to Hetzel's Pond where we could skate out to the island.

My friend Michelle, out in Vermont now, was the last house on the street. Right up against the best part of the woods.

Google carries me from the couch across years and miles until I'm squarely above it. So clear how the wind rushes cold against my face coasting the hill into the Elk's parking lot, late for swim team practice. My green banana-seat Schwinn is steady flying, arms to the sky, ready to lift off. I feel. Thirty-years gone and I feel it, smell the chlorine. All skinny limbs, tan and covered in welts; equal parts Ohio mud and scabbed-mosquito bites.

I zoom in and go street to street along the pavement and the paths for hours, following faded footsteps to long forgotten treasures: the German Sheppard puppy I brought home (and who's owner called to claim him hours after my mom caved to the begging, said I could keep him); the ice-caves carved in snow banks during the Great Blizzard of '78 (so high I could walk through them upright); Eastgate Pharmacy and pockets stuffed with penny candy (bought with change shaken from the United Jewish Federation charity box on the kitchen counter. If you slipped a knife in and jiggled it just right, quarters slid down the blade - NOT proud of this.)

Street to street until I am asleep on the couch without making it into a bed. Crashed in my clothes, the comfort of a favorite blanket, I dream of the ocean. Me on the shore, turbulent water coming wave and wave and wave. They break from every direction, smashing one swell into another. We're watching the water, me and a handful of people I don't see but know are there. It's a lifeguard training where we will swim cross-current, parallel to the beach, in the roughest part of the water. But, I'm not training to be a lifeguard.

"I'm not going to be a lifeguard," I tell someone who isn't there. "I'm just swimming the rip-tide to build strength."

I wake into daylight, Longhill Dr. still on the screen. Follow the roads to Packard Park, where I did lifeguard, and the pool is gone. It's just the guardhouse, locker rooms and a flat expanse of grass.