I was reading this General Questions thread about alleys, and it got me to reminiscing about the alleys in the neighborhood where I grew up, a small town in a rural county, in a mostly rural Southern state.
Our house was built in the early 1940s, as was the entire neighborhood, I would assume. The blocks were fairly short, about 10 houses long. Bisecting the block from both directions were alleys, which, for the most part, ran the entire length. (Some streets didn’t have them go all the way through for some reason.) I lived on Ninth Street, on the corner. A few houses down in either direction was the alley, and as kids they were our pathways.
We knew the alleys like the backs of our hands; we knew our neighbors backyards, we played in their gardens, climbed their trees. “Cutting through the alley” was repeated daily. It’s how we got around.
I miss alleys. Somehow, they seemed to connect us to our neighbors more fully.
When I grew up, I lived in a different small town, and it too is bisected by alleys in the older part of town where I, of course, lived. Maybe of these alleys are paved, so used are they, and necessary, it seems, to daily life.
Now I live in a new house and there’s a gorgeous green space beyond my back yard, which gives my kids a great, though different, place to play. But to my nostalgic mind, it’s just not the same as those public, yet secret alleyways where my feet traveled in childhood, on the way to great hide-and-go-seek hiding places, created-then-abandoned secret clubs, to a friends house.
I can still see, in my mind’s eye, the place in the middle of our block where the alleys intersected, and visualize the garden that was always planted nearby. Over there in the pine tree we always climbed and beyond, the wide world, where I eventually took all my daydreams.
