Silent Summer
Every spring, dump trucks drove down Metzerott Road with spray cannons mounted on top. They made a full circuit, both sides of the road, to hose down the trees. The trucks arrived month after month, year after year. Usually, they turned onto Patricia Court, too, and wetted the ornamental pear trees that never grew pears. Often, our neighborhood got weekly treatments in May, June, and July.
As a child, I felt more mystified by the concept of pear trees without fruit than I was by the spray trucks. Like the rest of the neighborhood kids, I played in the spray. It wasn't fun but we didn’t let the chemical mist stop a baseball game or kickball game. At worst, we slipped in the grass and got drenched. Any other inconvenience seemed unimportant. The moist air from the trucks smelled weird but it was interesting, too. It wasn’t quite like anything else. The oddness of it lingered around the leaves of the trees and settled like dew in the grass and stayed there for an hour or so.
When the trucks turned onto Patricia court, the neighborhood adults stood in their front yards, arms folded, and nodded at the drivers, obviously happy to have their share of the spraying. Their rows of trees harbored gypsy moths and tent caterpillars according to the adults I'd heard, so they felt they needed this DDT solution.
In the third summer, something changed. The trucks rolled through, distributing their chemical coverings as usual but the adults reacted differently.
“Come in! Come inside!” my mother called to us from her front door.
"What's wrong?" I trotted in her direction. My little brother followed.
"I don't want you playing out in the field when they're spraying it."
"But mom!"
"Come on! Anyway, doesn't it smell awful?" She wrinkled her nose. She hadn't remarked on it any of the times before. I didn't mind the smell and she hadn't until now. But she remained at the door, hands on hips, and stared at me until I trudged inside.
The next time the trucks passed through and the next, my mother's reaction was the same. She waved me indoors. Other parents called their children into their houses, too. By the middle of summer, my protests over being called in had weakened because our games were getting broken up even when I was the last to get the summons. There was no point in staying if most of us were forbidden to play.
Later, on the south side of the house with other adults, my parents chatted on the porch outside our kitchen doorway. It was a nice day and everyone but my mother wanted to smoke in the breeze.
"Do you really think DDT is bad?" another woman asked my mother.
For her response, my mother turned to me. I found it slightly alarming.
"Didn't you tell me you saw a flock of dead birds?" she asked.
"Yeah," I answered warily. Mostly, I had seen single birds. A few times, I had seen groups of them. Once, I walked through an entire flock, a wide, green field full of greyish birds lying mostly on their backs with their legs and beaks to the sky. I had poked a couple of the bodies with a stick. They proved to be weirdly firm.
"That could have been a disease," someone volunteered, a man's voice.
"I don't think it was," said my mother.
"They're spraying for insects," said a woman. "That's all they're killing. The insects."
"The birds eat insects," my mother said.
"I thought they ate worms," said a man who hadn't spoken.
The conversation flowed back and forth for a while. I wandered down the stairs and back up, hoping to see other kids in the neighborhood playing outside. But there wasn't even a dog in view. All I had was some adults acting like adults.
Someone asked my mother if she had read 'Silent Spring.' She nodded. For the first time in a while, my father spoke up.
"Ann thinks Rachel Carson is a saint," he said.
"I hear she died of cancer," someone murmured.
The group puffed their cigars and cigarettes in silence for a moment. My mother scowled and turned away. My father nodded to his guests.
#
In the process of writing this down, I seemed to remember something nonsensical. It happens in the recall process. Generally, I drop the nonsense details if they aren't vital to the story; I have to ignore them.
This time, when I pictured my mother talking about the book by Rachel Carson, I remembered her standing outside the door to our kitchen in Patricia Court. It could only have been a true, exterior door. It could only have exited from the kitchen. It could only have been placed high up, too, a full story off the ground so it required a staircase.
Clearly, such a house configuration is foolish. I've seen a lot of living spaces since I lived in College Park. In none of them have I seen an outside door attached to the side of the home in the middle of its kitchen and dining room. Who would design a space that way? Why would anyone buy into the design? Is it helpful to have an extra kitchen exit when the front door to the house is fifteen feet away? No.
Why have the side door leave the house at a full story above the ground? You'd have to turn a corner immediately as you stepped out. Or turn as you came in, bearing an armload of groceries.
And yet, when I pictured my mother talking about Rachel Carson, there she was outside the phantom-like side door next to the kitchen, talking with her friends as they leaned against the metal rails around the landing and stairs.
I doubted myself; I wanted to drive to the old family home and see. But we live in an era when that's not strictly necessary. It occurred to me I could take advantage of the most obvious alternative and browse to Google Street View. There, I found my childhood home. But the side of the house I wanted to see wasn't visible. I virtually stepped to the house next door. And turned right. And there it was, the side door of my childhood home precisely as I remembered it.
It makes no sense. It's up there, off the kitchen and dining room, one story off the ground.
#
When I was five or six, every drive on University Boulevard seemed to involve cleaning bug guts off windshields. In fact, everywhere we drove, whether to visit relatives, run errands, visit Amish country, spend a day at the beach, or go any place at all (well, anywhere except a big city), we had to clean the windshields. We did it constantly. We cleaned and cleaned. Gas stations provided good tools for it.
Recently, on a trip through some states in the midwest that included North Dakota and Montana, I was reminded of the need to clean windshields. Driving through, we saw bugs hitting our car. I felt I'd been transported in time. Large insects have been missing on the east coast of the United States for most of my life. They stopped hitting windshields when I reached my teens. They died out so slowly, I didn't really notice. They had been a constant rain against the cars, once. But the downpour of bodies thinned out. And then it was gone.
More noticeable than the insects, maybe, were the birds. When I was six, flocks of birds covered the sky at times, end to end. The swarms were big enough to cast checkered shadows from one side of the park to the other. Those thinned out, too, and although I still see birds, they travel in what my mother would have called small flocks.
"Very small," she would say.
Yes, flocks are all small, now.
#
A small detail: as I remember the house better, I can hear the clang of my feet on the steps outside the door off the kitchen and dining room. Those steps were metal. They made a ringing sound that, over the reach of decades, feels haunting - clear, memorable, but distant and forever lost.
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