Green Transformer Box

Lauren and I used to stand on the green box and pet the horses. It put us at just the right height to stroke the long faces of the chestnut horses. In the fall my mother would have my brothers and I collect the wormed apples from our delightfully climbable apple tree and toss them to the horses. My brothers and I would stand on the green box to toss the apples over. The green box was "Safe" in tag games and the table for imaginary games of House.

That horse pasture is now the location for a cul-de-sac of eight houses. The sandbox has been turned into a vegetable garden. Both peach trees have died and been chopped down and added to the firewood pile. A white, solid, vinyl fences have replaced the slotted wooden fence that so easily gave slivers. The slide of the swing set fell off. After a few gymnastic routines with neighborhood kids the poles of the swing-set moved out of place. Screws came out of the teeter-totter and have been carried off by ants. Now, if aliens invaded and took a gander at the backyard, they would never know that a blue swing set once entertained flocks of children here.

The summer pool has come and gone and come and gone and been patched up and stored in the garage and come and gone and been hauled to the dump. The suffocated grass under the pool died, and that circle of lawn became naked dirt and, over time, the grass has grown and seeded and spread and grown until that naked patch of dirt filled in with grass to blend with the rest of the yard.

The deck has been built and stained and worn by the weather and stained again. The umbrella on the deck table has been damaged by the wind and tossed out with the pogo-stick, sandbox toys, pool cover, and all those wormed apples that can no longer be thrown to the horses.

The apple tree has been trimmed. The workers chopped off my favorite branch: the branch in the perfect location for throwing things at the brothers below and blocking their weapons. I am still mad about losing that branch. One summer we had a tree house built in that tree. It's been a long time since any of us have been up there for a picnic. The trunk of the tree and the biggest branches are now plagued with a dark sign of death. The tree is sick. In a short time that tree will go the way of all the earth.

The two redwood picnic tables have dwindled to the one picnic table and that picnic table faced the fire yesterday leaving us with no picnic tables.

Then there is the green transformer box. It has always been in the same south-west corner of my backyard. Stable. Reliable. Green. Warm. Constant. From the anchor of the green box I have watched my backyard go through the seasons of my childhood and now it is stuck in a bleak winter; a tundra never to again see the elementary-aged children kicking soccer balls at the fence or making a river run through the sand-town. The green box will be the longest-lasting memento of my childhood outside: a government-owned, green, metallic box.

But you know what? I would trade that box for my peach trees or my rickety old fence any day. I would rather have a pasture of horses or that one branch of the apple tree-ESPECIALLY that one branch of the apple tree- than have a green box. But I'll take it. Every day I drift a little bit further from childhood and I'll take any anchor I can find.