A Letter to My Childhood Street

Dear Loveland Drive,

As I embark down a path into early adulthood, I’ve spent lots of long car rides and late nights reflecting on where I grew up. Recently after the unexpected loss of one of my childhood best friends, someone that you know and love, I’ve began painting a picture of what has made my upbringing so memorable. No matter how many times I turn the picture I’ve created and squint real hard, I always find you at the center. I have been blessed with an extraordinary childhood and I owe it to you, the place that I have been lucky enough to call home for the past 22 years. I’ve never taken the time to thank you for all that you’ve given me, which turns out to be everything.

Thank you for…

Giving me not one, but two beautiful houses to grow up in.

You are the only place that I’ve ever known to be home. When I was six, my youngest brother was born and we needed a bigger house to accommodate our growing family. My parents knew that they couldn’t make us leave, and they wanted just the opposite of that. Instead, we moved just three houses down the street. My Mom trying to explain “just three houses” to a young me resulted in a tantrum and tears because I thought I would never see my best friends again, who lived right next door on both sides and directly across the street. You, our street, was one of the most valuable pieces of our family that we weren’t ready to give up. This was just the beginning - who knew that you had much more to offer.

Bringing together a special group of families.

Now this is where it becomes difficult to express my gratitude towards you, as it is hard to put the extent of my emotions into words that do them justice. I’ll always love the ideal balance of foliage and the charming, colonial houses that make up our picture perfect suburban neighborhood. I’ll always love the way the big dipper sits perfectly visible in the night sky, with the streetlights never bright enough to interrupt my favorite view. But your beauty is not what I appreciate you the most for. You brought together a group of strangers and formed a Loveland Drive family that has grown together over the years.

It’s common to hear of childhood friends with whom you share your early years, but more uncommon when the friendships span across generations. As kids, we grew up listening to the stories of our parents in their early years. The Dads camping trips to see the Allman Brothers concerts (although I don’t think we ever got the full truth), the holiday parties and lots of get-togethers and memories of spending time together. We were the subsequent generation of best friends left to follow in their footsteps. While a group of young best friends were growing up and tackling the game of life together, a group of best friends were raising their children together. This last sentence is key to understanding the dynamic of the street. There are kids that struggle to find one set of parents to care and support them, while I was blessed with more support than I could have ever hoped for. Growing up I had not only my birth parents, but you gave me a handful of other adults that loved me unconditionally like their own.

While friendships come and go in life one thing remains true, you can’t make old friends. As time passes you learn about friendships, what they are and what they are not. Some friendships are fleeting while some are outgrown as both people continue to find themselves. College brings about distance and a new group of people to meet, ultimately leading to separate journeys. There’s something to be said for a group of kids who learn from one another and take on the world together. Without knowing it at the time, we shaped each other into the people we are today. While friendships come and go in each stage of life, it’s the lucky ones that have the same friends during each stage. We all set off down different paths, but the bond between us was never broken. Thank you Loveland, for giving me my forever friends that will always hold a special place in my heart.

The Tree.

The beautiful maple tree that sits in the yard of my old house has become quite symbolic. When I think of Loveland Drive, I think of “The Tree” and the countless memories with it as the centerpiece. We would always climb the tree, even tying cargo nets throughout the branches to provide enough seating to accommodate our entire posse. As long as we were all together, we could spend hours sitting up there, usually passing the time with Pokemon on our Gameboys or plotting ways to throw water balloons from up in the branches. The Tree became the foundation of one of our oldest traditions. We now have pictures in front of The Tree on every first day of school and milestone event, which we were not too fond of at the time. We had a love hate relationship with these pictures that was mostly dominated by hate. While they do make for funny Throwback Thursdays, the photo shoot was more for our Moms than for us and required us to be dragged out of bed earlier than usual. But now these pictures have frozen our memories in time and I am thankful to have them to look back on.

The Woods and The Pond.

Behind my house was a wooded area that stretched across a large portion of the houses on the street. As kids we loved to wander outside and explore, testing our limits and trying to discover places to spend our time. There was a small pond behind the houses in the woods that in the mind of a child was equivalent to having a house on the beach. In reality, small pond may be a bit of a stretch and oversized puddle is probably more accurate. We spent our days catching tadpoles and frogs that we would give to a neighbor down the street in exchange for candy of our choice. When it came to the pond we had one mission, to find a way to get to the other side. If we look at this logically, we could have run a little ways down the tree line until we hit the road, crossed the street and easily have been at our destination. But there was something so thrilling about challenging our imaginations to figure out a way to make it across the water. One day we made a raft, consisting of a piece of wood with large Styrofoam blocks connected to the sides with string (safe to say this attempt was unsuccessful). The woods became a place for us to release our creative energy and come up with ideas as a cohesive unit, while dodging snapping turtles all at the same time. We learned that when you dig up tulip bulbs they look an awful lot like onions, but you shouldn’t make younger siblings eat them because you have to call poison control. We would spend all day building forts up in the trees that would later be taken down at the request of my mother who didn’t like seeing the crooked, not so visually appealing wooden structures from out of our back window. We would wander as far back as we could go and getting braver with each passing day, hoping to find the feared farmer with a gun from the well known neighborhood tall tales. Thank you for giving us room to be kids, letting our wild imaginations loose and exploring the outdoors.

The Island.

As a group, we were huge fans of playing games that allowed us to do what we did best, run around in a pack outside. Whether it was ghost in the graveyard, guns, elimination tag, kick the can or manhunt, the island became an easy way to distinguish the boundary line. Thanks to your curvature and intersection with your neighboring street Penelope, you provided us with a perfect “island” of land surrounded by road to play our games. The rule was simple, you stayed on the island or you were out of bounds and disqualified. That was that, and game on.

Giving us perfect snow banks for our forts.

Winters in Liverpool are dreaded by most, but never by us. Another opportunity for us to put our creativity to the test, designing snow forts that could withstand the weather and the frequent snowplow activity. We would spend hours digging holes, making shelves to stash our endless supply of snowballs, tunneling to connect the different parts of the fort and lining the outsides with pieces of ice for an extra layer of protection. We’d spend all day working on a fort to have it filled in with snow by a plow the next day. Even though our hard work would be gone in a blink of an eye, we didn’t care. In the end, it was the fun in getting to the finished product that we appreciated the most. And yeah, it was icing on the cake to have a cooler fort than our rivals from down the road.

The Dead End.

This was the one part of the road that we were allowed to run around in without having to worry about traffic. The place where all of the kids had learned to ride a bike, where we put our homemade ramps and rails during our skating phase, where we rode our razor scooters while dodging the tennis balls thrown by our friends. The place where we played basketball, street hockey and four square without any cars to delay our game and enough room to sprint after a well executed four square “Cherry Bomb”. The Dead End was our gateway to the Woods, with trails that we had carved out from our consistent exploring. Thank you for giving us our own homemade version of a playground.

Your street signs.

When college was right around the corner, it was scary to imagine being far away from you. We were all accustomed to the comfort that you provided us, our own security blanket that had protected us for all of these years. We owe you an apology for stealing your signs, but thank you for lending us a piece of home to come along with us on our separate journeys.

Thanks again Loveland, for giving me the best childhood I could have ever asked for.

Love your biggest fan,

Ally