Rooting around in the archives in search of a name for my next sweater design I came across this beaded toy in Dad’s keepsake box. A poignant childhood memory, I see it hanging from the rearview mirror of my parents’ gray Buick as he drove. Sometimes I sat in Dad’s lap as he did. These were simpler times to be sure, before we knew better.
In that same box and stemming from that same time period I found the purchase and sales agreement for the house I grew up in. It turns out that Dad saved things too. Renters up until this point, on July 18, 1958 my parents bought their first home for $14,200. We weren’t rich, and this was surely a financial stretch, but the bank granted the mortgage and there we lived, in this house in the suburbs of Boston, for 16 years – idyllic years as I recall them, through the haze of my childhood.
My memories of the neighborhood are good ones, with some of the friends I made there still in my life even now. And when I’m nearby I often detour through its streets to conjure up cozy thoughts.
Prompted by our current political and social climate I recently read The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein (A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America), and I thought back to my old neighborhood. In the mid 60’s a black family moved into a house on the next block. Following that, several of their neighbors – my neighbors – put their houses on the market and moved away. I wish my parents were still alive so I could ask them more about it from their adult perspective at that time. My new classmate Teddy and his sister were the only two black children in my elementary school and I can only imagine their experience. The thought makes me cringe. Armed now with newfound knowledge from my reading I see that their ability to purchase a home in our middle-class white neighborhood was likely a result of Fair Housing Acts initiated by our government during that decade. Prior to that it’s very possible no mortgage would have been made available to them.
I was on my way to a pal’s house for dinner yesterday and decided to visit my neighborhood again for a quick reminiscence. As I traveled familiar streets, I now noticed many front lawns with newly placed placards posted in support of the police – coded racist responses to Black Lives Matter. Deflated, I turned around and went on my way. I don’t think I’ll go back. My comforting nostalgia is no longer found there. Maybe it never was. Maybe it lived only in my child-mind’s eye, recalled during simpler times, before I knew better.
Where My Heart Is – my latest knit design, published October 3, 2020.