Divison Essay The Road in Front of My House

I am writing about the road in front of my childhood home for two reasons one because it was the last time I actually was able to just sit and watch traffic for lacking of nothing better to do. Two, I now live on a drive not a road. I have history on the Wyman Road it was also where my mother grew up and it only seems natural that I too would experience the best times of my youth on that road. Although our viewing pleasure was only 125 feet long of road footage, my siblings and I agree we definitely had the best spot on the whole road to view all sorts of antics.

First, there was a small hill, we called it a belly tickler, there due to the ledge that ran under the piece of road in front of my house, was cause for much laughter. The cars back then where big gas hogs. Many of them did not have proper shock absorbers under them. On more than one occasion we would watch the cars speed by our home and hit that small piece of hill and bounce a great distance afterward and even spin off a hub cap on to our property somewhere. You didn't even have to be present to know that someone was going to fast and hit the belly tickler, the scraping of their exhaust system was clue enough. I'm fairly sure we could have opened up a shop for exhaust repair and hub cap recovery.

Secondly, the distance between our dooryard and mailbox, which was directly across the road from our house, was six giant steps or twelve small baby steps or ten hops or five crooked cartwheels wide. It really depended on who was watching from the living room window how you actually crossed the road to get to the mailbox. Safely crossing the road was not always the best decision made by an eight year old. I left a lot of knee skin on that particular path to the mailbox. But I never got ran over like my mother always predicted. She would say, "one of these days you're going to get run over cutting up like that." She was very good at giving warning advice prior to trauma that never seemed to happen.

Thirdly, when the boy starting coming around in his car and showing off is when I must admit I did the most embarrassing thing I ever did on that road. As if it was some sort of romantic ritual, he was very talented at leaving rubber tire marks on the road in front of my house. I remember being more impressed with the smoke from the tires than the actually rubber mark itself. However, one time, after a long tire mark was left behind, said boy kissed me, he didn't even ask first. Again I wasn't as impressed with the kiss as much as needing to capture a piece of tangible history to mark the event. So I ran into my house after he left and took a picture of the skid marks on the road with my Kodak Instamatic 126. I kept that piece of history for years and though it seems funny to admit now I would totally do the same thing today.

When I return to the Wyman Road, I smile at all the memories made on that road many still very fresh in my head today. I'm even more sure when people ride by that small piece road, they don't think about the little blonde haired girl that lived there for nine years. They don't know about the excitement that ledge contained or the secrets of the bump belly tickler that seems to be a whole lot smaller now than I remember. I'll bet the few times I missed a cartwheel and dragged my DNA across the road was never given another thought once the rain would wash the blood away. But as for those tire marks that kept showing up in front of our house that caused my parents such confusion during that summer in 1979, I still have a picture, somewhere, that represents my historic first kiss and a pretty nice set burned rubber tire marks.