It happened. It happens to every person during the journey from the innocence of childhood to the experience of adulthood. In yesteryear, I was Dolly Wood, a skinny little girl with enough insecurity to still my tongue around strangers. Some days now, it all seems such a short time ago that I can almost reach back in time and touch the tips of my Shirley Temple curls. I can smell the aroma of brown gravy bubbling in an iron skillet and the coffee perking on a gas stove that sat cattycornered in the back of our kitchen.
On other days, childhood seems so long ago that I can see only bits and pieces of fading images: My grandmother's silver hair piled in a bun, like a tiara, atop her head; my grandfather's worn, faded fedora with a hole in the front crease; and my white hen, Petsy. She followed me everywhere during one summer and then, perched on her roost, she froze to death in our henhouse during the ensuing winter. In my innocence, I did not know that until my mother told me when I was an adult.
In the far-away distance of time I can still hear the dwindling sounds of my once green world: the laughter of neighborhood children; the soft voice of Grandmother Frame whose life was hard, so hard; my grandfather's scuffing footsteps across the cement porch as he ambled toward his garden. There were discordant sounds, too, but they can wait for another day.
Somewhere along the way as all of us travel the road toward maturity, perhaps never arriving there, a transformation occurs and the children we once were have been replaced by someone else. Time passage brings victories and failures and disappointments and losses so that we gradually morph into another person. But there is forever a bit of the past in the present.
If I chance to meet a long-ago friend I haven't seen in years, the bone structure beneath my aging face will give her a clue as to who I am. She and I speak the same language, for we are from the same generation so we know what it was like back then. We cannot say much about the present, for my childhood friend has traveled one road to adulthood while I have traveled another. When past and present collide, there are jarring realizations of what has been lost and what has been gained. The recollections of childhood remind us of how our lives as children have molded us into the persons we are today.
I often watch the setting sun dip out of sight behind the tall pines at the edge of our backyard. In almost the same split second, I can see another sunset as I stand on the concrete porch of my childhood home and look toward the hill in the far distance. I watch that sun fire the sky with a red-orange brilliance before it descends behind the hill, and I know that despite the loss of childhood, my growing-up years will always be a part of who I am now.
Dolly Withrow is a retired English professor and the author of four books. She is a columnist for The Charleston Daily Mail and The State Journal.
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