Have a happy, scrappy, new year...

Just feeling silly, I suppose.

I grew up at the end of a little road off route 156 in Waterford, which is the road that branches off shore route 1 and continues along the shoreline while route 1 branches a little inland.

The road was (still is) called 'B Lane'. It didn't merit a real name, I guess.

About a half mile long, the road climbs slowly to a dead end, which is where our house was. The road was dirt until I was about six or seven, which made it a decent place to sled. It was a sad day when they paved it, since that meant they also plowed it. The kids who liked hot rods were happy, I guess.

My parents' house was one room and had a dirt floor when they moved in shortly after marrying. They partitioned the room to make a tiny bedroom and an all-purpose room, and put in a floor. Eventually they added a room off the first bedroom, where all three of my brothers slept. I slept there too, though my oldest brother's departure shortly after I was born (he's seventeen years older than I am) made it somewhat less cramped. When I got to be about four, I think, another addition was built on the other side, off the all-purpose room. I vaguely remember it being built. So then we had a living room and I had my own bedroom. The total square footage of the place couldn't have been 600 sq. ft.

My childhood friend Pat and I went up there this fall. It felt very strange; I kept getting a sort of deja vu-like feeling, which is a little weird considering that I was hardly absent a day from the place until I was over 20 years old.

Neither Pat's nor my house is still standing. It looks a bit less like little Appalachia, though it's certainly not an upscale area.

I'd give anything to go back into the woods behind where my house used to be. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time back there, playing in the tiny stream that ran close to the woods' edge, or reading with my back propped against one of the boulders the last ice age's glacier had kindly left for me.

Sometimes I would get quiet, knowing that someone was there. The presence didn't feel menacing; I just knew I had to respect it. We used to find arrowheads there and in the back yard, and after a while, I became convinced that the spirits I felt surrounding me were the natives who had left those stone bits behind.

I dream about B Lane sometimes. They almost connected another road from the other edge of the woods to it, back when my mother was home dying of colon cancer, but ledge kept them from completing that project. I'm glad.