Memoir: Talk of Our Town

I grew up in a very small, close knit neighbourhood. It was a “cul-de-sac”, and therefore if you didn’t live there, you didn’t drive up there. We could always pick out an “outside” car that had gotten lost in our little maze – one of many that make up the suburbs of Dartmouth.We all looked out for each other. The adults watched all their neighbours’ kids while they played in the street. The closeness between the residents in my neighbourhood, and the relative isolation, made living there almost like living in a small town unto ourselves.

The community feel that permeated the homes and yards, and the large number of children living there who constantly ran around the streets like a noisy herd of antelope, resulted in a great deal of “talk”. By “talk” I mean there was constantly a story, usually rumour, being passed back and forth from eager mouths to nosy ears. Any anomaly or novelty of any kind immediately caused speculation.We kids wasted no time making up ideas about what went on behind closed doors.

We aimed particular cruelty at the closed doors of neighbours who either yelled at us to stay off their lawns, or gave us dirty looks for taking up the whole street with our bikes and sidewalk chalk.The most particular cruelty, however, was directed at houses, not neighbours (well at least not directly).

There were a few houses in our vicinity that invited more “talk” then others. There was one house that always seemed to be for sale; people never seemed to want to live there for more than a few months. Another house was very dirty, old, and unkempt with car parts lying all over the lawn and scary dogs chained to the porch.We never saw anyone go in or out of these houses, nor did we ever talk to anyone coming in or out. So, naturally we assumed that these places were breeding grounds for ghosts, drug dealers, and murderers, or the scene of horrible pagan or cult rituals.

We imagined piles of bodies or scary creatures locked away in the basements, and cryptic messages scrawled on the walls. We tried our best to avoid these houses at any cost for fear that we’d be sucked into them never to be seen again, or horribly brainwashed by some kind of radioactive waves. We avoided ringing the doorbells when selling cookies or trick-or-treating, and crossed the street when coming near them, casting sideways glances over our shoulders.Of course, these worries were completely silly - the result of wild, naïve childhood imaginings, and peer pressure, rather than researched fact or eye witness testimony.

When I got older, I worked up the courage to knock on the door of one of the houses while fundraising. I encountered an unassuming, even pleasant middle-aged woman, not a witch or a psychopath. However, no matter how mean, I wouldn’t take back the stories we told, the crazy ideas we planted in the imaginations of fellow neighbourhood kids, or our uneducated assumptions about total strangers. These stories and gossip are the thread in the quilt of my childhood and it is quite a colourful quilt indeed.