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Out of Manhattan

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When I was three my family moved from Manhattan to Flushing, on Long Island but still in New York City (Queens county). We had a house on a corner, two long blocks from Parsons Boulevard and one block from the Q16 bus that went to downtown Flushing, from whence you could take the subway to Manhattan, or get on the Q44 to go to the Bronx Zoo. It was about a half mile from the Sylvania lab on Linden Place where my father worked, a building that had previously been a Vicks plant and that smelled of Vap-o-rub for years after Vicks moved out.

That soon after WWII, a quarter of our backyard was the remains of a victory garden. My parents put a swing set and sandbox in the yard and planted daffodils all around the edge, inside the fence that separated the yard from the gravel sidewalk. There was a cherry tree to climb and a silver maple that wasn't any good for climbing. Way in the back were several small evergreens and the rhubarb that my parents put in. They would fertilize the rhubarb with excess flounder that my grandpa would give us after his frequent fishing trips out on Sheepshead Bay (wasn't that what the Pilgrims learned from the natives -- put some fish under your corn plants? But I don't think my grandpa expected the fish to end up that way) In the front yard my mother built a rock garden right on the corner, as much to discourage people from shortcutting across the lawn as because she liked the rock garden. There was a big forsythia bush at the corner of the house and two tall fir trees guarding the end of the front walk.