Deceitful Hills

 

From the age of three until I was ten, I lived in the town of Richmond Hill, Queens, New York.  What a beautiful place to grow up. There were flowers growing in the front and back of everyone’s house. Fruit trees and raspberry bushes were everywhere and easy to find.

My family had rows and rows of flowers and a peach tree in the backyard. Of course, you had to intercept a peach before the worms got to it and if you were lucky enough to do this, you would probably be eating the most delicious peach you ever tasted.

There were cherry trees, apple trees, and pear trees, too. Neighbors grew grape vines, raspberry bushes and even chestnut trees.  We knew where to find them all. We kids on the block pretty much knew that if you could find a piece of fruit to eat from one of these trees, you didn’t have to go home and have lunch.

Now, I could go on and on about the delicious fruit and beautiful flowers but what I really wanted to get to is the house with the three big hills that I grew up in. I loved living in that house in Richmond Hill with its sloping hills in front and on the side of the house.

When we moved to Woodhaven when I was ten, I was very sad. Oh, I made new friends and as time passed by, I missed my Richmond Hill house less and less. As more years passed, I found myself married with a young son.

I don’t know, couldn’t say what got me into a nostalgic mood one day which prompted me to announce, “I want to go see the house I grew up in, the one in Richmond Hill.” It was agreed so with a start of the car and my son in the back, off we went.

We talked on the way and I told my son and his father all about the abundance of flowers and fruit trees in the neighborhood. Then I started describing where my house was located on the block. I said to them, “When you get in front of my house, you will see two large hills in front by the sidewalk and one larger hill that winds around the corner.”

The car made a left and stopped right in front of the house. At first, I was so excited but then I became increasingly more confused. “Where are those three huge hills I talked about?” I asked in a very tiny voice. I used to slide down those big hills in the snow and run up and down them playing cowboys and Indians.

As I sat for awhile in the car with a painful look of disappointment on my face, I realized that the hills didn’t change or shrink in size. How could I have not thought about it?  When I was little, the hills were bigger, even huge to my small size. Now that I was a full-grown adult, of course, the hills were smaller.

I’ll never forget that day when I realized the three hills were only big or small in relation to whether I was bigger or smaller. After I got over the disappointment of it, my family and I had a silly laugh over it. One thing hadn’t changed, I still loved Richmond Hill.

Ellen G