Deer Creek Lane

        I often look back at my early childhood with a lot of confusion, mostly because it doesn’t line up
with my preteen or teen years. My parents were incredibly young, and they grew up right alongside me.
        In 2005, we uprooted our lives in New York so that my parents could declare their independence
from their own parents. The cheaper mortgage didn’t hurt either. I was three years old when we moved
down south, so I’ve always considered myself to be from Kentucky, though I always got the sense that my
family did not belong there.
        In Kentucky, it wasn’t unusual to get married and have kids before twenty, so my parents found
plenty of friends their own age with kids my age. We went to a hip megachurch, the kind where people
worshiped God and the local coffee shop in equal measure. We’d go to art shows in old houses with
acoustic guitars and cheese platters. My dad had a long goatee he liked to braid, plus a perpetually
infected eyebrow piercing. My mom used Manic Panic Vampire Red hair dye, and they both shopped at
Hot Topic back when it sold Lip Service and Tripp pants instead of Disney merch.
        Our house was built in the year 2000, one of only three on a street that was supposed to become a
full neighborhood before the developers ran out of money. Instead of a cul-de-sac lined with bikes and
minivans, we had a barely paved road surrounded by cow fields owned by a farmer named Happy. This
would be the backdrop of my life until I left for college 16 years later.
        I was part of what people now like to call “the last generation of kids who went outside,” though I
spent a suspicious amount of time indoors. My sister and I were homeschooled after moving, like most of
the kids in our small town. We spent nearly all our time together, and since both my parents worked, we
were often all the other had. This didn’t stop us from the usual sibling rivalry; the fights over the TV
remote, over who got to be older when playing pretend (though she had four years and twelve inches on
me, the answer still didn’t seem obvious), or over who ate the last Barbie Fairytopia Pop-Tart.
        I spent a lot of time sitting in front of the TV, snacking on slices of cheddar cheese melted onto
saltines in the toaster oven, a delicacy passed down from my mom’s own childhood. Every afternoon,
ABC Family would play two episodes of Full House followed by two episodes of Sabrina the Teenage
Witch in perfect chronological order. From 12 to 2 p.m. Eastern, that was my world. It was the closest I
could get to binge-watching before streaming existed.
        When there was nothing good on TV, our days were spent running barefoot through the field, our
nights catching lightning bugs in old pasta sauce jars and climbing hay bales that smelled like sun and
dust. Our favorite game was “Orphans.” We’d been raised on Annie and A Little Princess, and all the
American Girl books where someone had to overcome adversity, and since we didn’t have any adversity
in real life, we made it up. Add in some tragedy: a broken leg, a lost parent, a teen pregnancy and you had
the perfect after-dinner production, complete with a cow field backdrop.
        When we did play outside, we did it in style: a Disney Princess tricycle, a Hello Kitty razor
scooter, and a Barbie Jeep that groaned like a dying animal whenever it hit gravel. We had a kiddie pool
that we almost never filled with water. It was more useful upside down as a dinner table while playing
house, or leaned against the back deck as a shelter for our poor runaway orphan selves hiding from the
police.
        Our next-door neighbors were two boys about our ages. My sister and I would argue over whose
turn it was to knock on their door and ask if they could play; a terrifying task, since their mom’s default
answer was “no.” While the boys were also homeschooled, their parents had a more hands on approach,
which gave them a kind of prestige we couldn’t compete with. I did “school,” too, but I had my own
efficient method for getting through it: I tore out any pages I didn’t want to do and hid them under my
bed.
        The younger neighbor boy and I developed a system. Around 2 o’clock, just after my two-hour
TV ritual ended, and he finished his school work, he’d show up at my door and say, “I accidentally threw
my ball into your chicken coop.” Then I’d slip on my Old Navy flip-flops, the same ones I got every
summer, and climb into the wire enclosure to “retrieve” it. Afterward, he’d ask if I wanted to play. I
always said yes, pretending the plan hadn’t worked perfectly.
        For a short time, a little girl around my age lived across the street, in the third and final house of
our half-neighborhood. We had one playdate. I went into her room and immediately froze. Every single
thing in it had SpongeBob or Patrick’s face on it; the bedspread, the TV, the beanbag chair. Everything.
My parents never allowed character bedding, so maybe that made it seem even more grotesque. She made
me watch the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which I thought was inferior to the Tim
Burton version. I never went back.
        She didn’t take rejection well. Whenever she came over to ask me to play, I’d hide, but she would
run around our house, pressing her face against every window like a cartoon villain. Once, she even
walked in through the unlocked back door, poured herself a glass of milk, and left. My parents finally
believed me that she was weird. They moved away within the year.
        My childhood house in that half-built neighborhood was sold recently, and I’ve found myself
thinking about Deer Creek Lane again, the little street that was supposed to become something, but
instead it just ends.
        When I look back on those years, what I remember most isn’t the events but the feeling of
everything. I think of our fenced-in backyard, bright and overrun with dandelions. My dad handing us
quarters for every plastic cup we filled, later turning our haul into dandelion beer in the basement. I think
about the way summer used to smell; that first sharp breath of cut grass that made my whole body buzz
with excitement. It felt like school would never end, like time couldn’t move fast enough. But it also felt
too sweet to lose, the kind of moment I wished I could trap inside an old pasta jar, glowing and alive, just
like the lightning bugs we used to catch.

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