5. The Playground (cont.)

I never counted how many times they came. Certainly only at well-spaced intervals. But the hope of seeing them once more never left me, and even now that I am an adult the memory of the sweet voices calling—“Come on, Marion. Come and play!”—remains as strong within me as any “real” happiness I have ever known.

But all this was before the move. My family would carry everything we owned from the tiny four-room house into which I was born to a rambling two-story house with three upstairs bedrooms. This house belonged to the cement mill, just as the little house did. It was, in fact, even closer to the mill than the small one we’d lived in until then. Willis and I would each have our own rooms. And the crib would not even follow. I was to have Will’s bed. He would be moving up to a maple double purchased from a farmer who restored old furniture.

The last night before the move, I couldn’t sleep. I turned toward the black of the wall and away again, toward it and away. I ran my hands up and down the comforting bars of my crib. I had never felt so much that those bars kept me in as that they kept the rest of the world out. And now the crib was staying behind.

But even though the crib was being left behind—or given, I suppose, to some other family with a younger child—I didn’t mind. It was the wall I regretted leaving, the wall with the playground in it and the window that admitted the farmer and the horses and the wagon and the children who loved me.