As a tiny child, I wanted to pump this swing so high into the sky that my feet would touch the branches. I failed. That was reality, but memories of the joyful effort—of the wind on my face and the prickly ropes reddening my soft hands— live on. Other realities linger as well. The way this watercolor distorts the realities of our Northside Chicago backyard in the 1940’s expresses truths that I’d no words or grid for as a child.
The swing tree on the left was actually large—some of its lower branches swept down toward the ground. The stump on the right was smaller; it memorialized an ancient, bent plum tree. My father cut it down because it no longer bore fruit—despite the delicate white flowers it opened each spring. The stump was also our cemetery tree; it marked our first pet and animal burial ground. At first, Daddy said our little cemetery might fertilize the tree and help it bear fruit. It didn’t.
The many baby birds that died falling from the giant American elms at the front of the house or refused to respond to our worms and care, every squirrel foolish enough to leave the curb and get hit by a car on our quiet city street, and every goldfish that floated to the top of our fishbowls was buried with honor. All were gently coffined on beds of grass in empty Kleenex boxes. My sisters, the neighbor children and I would dig shallow graves, form solemn processions to the gravesite and the boy next door—because he was a boy—would play pastor/priest and utter a few words before we’d gently place the deceased into the earth and bury them at the foot of the tree.
When our father said the cemetery was too full, we moved it to the foot of the swing tree. Once he buried a pet kitten that ran into the street and got hit by a car in the bright open spot by the fence. That bright spot is exactly where our mother and Mrs. Waldron would meet to talk when they hung out wash on Monday mornings. We never crossed that fence; the house and yard next door were off limits. The back yards beyond our own were forbidden and far away.
This painting is about far more than my childhood exhilaration over swinging high. It’s about the swing’s emptiness and the cemeteries; it’s about the light by the fence where our mother used to stand. It’s about the fence keeping us in and the world out; and it’s about the unexplored largeness inside the fence as well as all the largeness of the unknown spaces outside those simple slats of wood.
What I didn’t paint matters. Our small backyard was only four houses and an empty lot west of a busy street. There, red and cream colored trolleys with loud bells on a rope and uniformed conductors connected Chicago’s densely settled Near-north side with us. We lived near the city’s edge. South of our street, almost every lot was all filled up with buildings. North of us, we could smell manure from the stables on Berwyn. Weeds and vegetable gardens filled long strings of empty lots. Here and there an apartment building or two popped up to punctuate the breathing room. Automobiles were few and the roar of airplanes was unusual. There was a country air of quiet about our part of the soot covered city. When the family drove South—even a little ways— and caught a whiff of the smelly Stockyards, we were glad to be North siders.
In the 1940’s, our house was the oldest around. We were proud that it was over one hundred years old. It started out as a farmhouse for a big truck farming family. Our little back yard felt like the country on a street where a yellow brick six flat and a couple of red brick three flats rose between smaller houses built in the early 1900’dreds. Besides a swing and a cemetery, we’d lots of old hosta, peonies and bridal wreath. Our grandma’s revived an tiny old rock garden with lily of the valley. A grapevine grew on a trellis on the west side of the garage. An old cherry tree and an old apple tree blossomed and bore fruit on the east side. A big old catalpa shaded the house in the summer and our swing tree was an ailanthus. We’d a tiny vegetable garden with real snakes and big gray city rats would hide in our outdoor cellar. Daddy said our garage was made out of an old carriage house. We didn’t know our backyard was tiny; it was crammed full of life. And death was a real part of life inside our little world. We acknowledged it with ceremonies of reverence and respect. The unknown world beyond us was full of wonder and mystery. The gifts of growing up to trust God through loss and grief were far away too. They were buried inside us—waiting— or else far, far away, waiting to be given—like the joys of swinging high enough to touch beyond the skies.
Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” Matthew 19:14 NIV
