There were fences in the old days when we were children.
Across the front of a yard and down the side, they were iron, either spiked along the top or arched in half circles.
Alley fences were made of solid boards higher than one's head, but not so high as the golden glow in a corner or the hollyhocks that grew in a line against them.
Side fences were hidden beneath lilacs and hundred-leaf roses;
front fences were covered with Virginia creeper or trumpet vines or honeysuckle.
Square corner- and gate posts were an open-work pattern of cast-iron foliage;
they were topped by steeples complete in every detail: high-pitched roof, pinnacle, and narrow gable.
On these posts the gates swung open with a squeak and shut with a metallic clang.

The only extended view possible to anyone less tall than the fences was that obtained from an upper bough of the apple tree.
The primary quality of that view seems, now, to have been its quietness, but that cannot at the time have impressed us.
What one actually remembers is its greenness.
From high in the tree, the whole block lay within range of the eye, but the ground was almost nowhere visible.
One looked down on a sea of leaves, a breaking wave of flower.
Every path from back door to barn was covered by a grape-arbor, and every yard had its fruit trees.
In the center of any open space remaining our grandfathers had planted syringa and sweet-shrub, snowball, rose-of-Sharon and balm-of-Gilead.
From above one could only occasionally catch a glimpse of life on the floor of this green sea: a neighbor's gingham skirt flashing into sight for an instant on the path beneath her grape-arbor, or the movement of hands above a clothesline and the flutter of garments hung there, half-way down the block.

That was one epoch: the apple-tree epoch.
Another had ended before it began.
Time is a queer thing and memory a queerer;
the tricks that time plays with memory and memory with time are queerest of all.
From maturity one looks back at the succession of years, counts them and makes them many, yet cannot feel length in the number, however large.
In a stream that turns a mill-wheel there is a lot of water;
the mill-pond is quiet, its surface dark and shadowed, and there does not seem to be much water in it.
Time in the sum is nothing.
And yet -- a year to a child is an eternity, and in the memory that phase of one's being -- a certain mental landscape -- will seem to have endured without beginning and without end.
The part of the mind that preserves dates and events may remonstrate, "It could have been like that for only a little while";
but true memory does not count nor add: it holds fast to things that were and they are outside of time.

Once, then -- for how many years or how few does not matter -- my world was bound round by fences, when I was too small to reach the apple tree bough, to twist my knee over it and pull myself up.
That world was in scale with my own smallness.
I have no picture in my mind of the garden as a whole -- that I could not see -- but certain aspects of certain corners linger in the memory: wind-blown, frost-bitten, white chrysanthemums beneath a window, with their brittle brown leaves and their sharp scent of November;
ripe pears lying in long grass, to be turned over by a dusty-slippered foot, cautiously, lest bees still worked in the ragged, brown-edged holes;
hot-colored verbenas in the corner between the dining-room wall and the side porch, where we passed on our way to the pump with the half-gourd tied to it as a cup by my grandmother for our childish pleasure in drinking from it.

It was mother who planted the verbenas.
I think that my grandmother was not an impassioned gardener: she was too indulgent a lover of dogs and grandchildren.
My great-grandmother, I have been told, made her garden her great pride;
she cherished rare and delicate plants like oleanders in tubs and wall-flowers and lemon verbenas in pots that had to be wintered in the cellar;
she filled the waste spots of the yard with common things like the garden heliotrope in a corner by the woodshed, and the plantain lilies along the west side of the house.
These my grandmother left in their places (they are still there, more persistent and longer-lived than the generations of man) and planted others like them, that flourished without careful tending.
Three of these only were protected from us by stern commandment: the roses, whose petals might not be collected until they had fallen, to be made into perfume or rose-tea to drink;
the peonies, whose tight sticky buds would be blighted by the laying on of a finger, although they were not apparently harmed by the ants that crawled over them;
and the poppies.
I have more than once sat cross-legged in the grass through a long summer morning and watched without touching while a poppy bud higher than my head slowly but visibly pushed off its cap, unfolded, and shook out like a banner in the sun its flaming vermilion petals.
Other flowers we might gather as we pleased: myrtle and white violets from beneath the lilacs;
the lilacs themselves, that bloomed so prodigally but for the most part beyond our reach;
snowballs;
hollyhock blossoms that, turned upside down, make pink-petticoated ladies;
and the little, dark blue larkspur that scattered its seed everywhere.

More potent a charm to bring back that time of life than this record of a few pictures and a few remembered facts would be a catalogue of the minutiae which are of the very stuff of the mind, intrinsic, because they were known in the beginning not by the eye alone but by the hand that held them.
Flowers, stones, and small creatures, living and dead.
Pale yellow snapdragons that by pinching could be made to bite;
seed-pods of the balsams that snapped like fire-crackers at a touch;
red-and-yellow columbines whose round-tipped spurs were picked off and eaten for the honey in them;
morning-glory buds which could be so grasped and squeezed that they burst like a blown-up paper bag;
bright flowers from the trumpet vine that made "gloves" on the ends of ten waggling fingers.
Fuzzy caterpillars, snails with their sensitive horns, struggling grasshoppers held by their long hind legs and commanded to "spit tobacco, spit".
Dead fledgling birds, their squashed-looking nakedness and the odor of decay that clung to the hand when they had been buried in our graveyard in front of the purple flags.
And the cast shell of a locust, straw-colored and transparent, weighing nothing, fragile but entire, with eyes like bubbles and a gaping slit down its back.
Every morning early, in the summer, we searched the trunks of the trees as high as we could reach for the locust shells, carefully detached their hooked claws from the bark where they hung, and stabled them, a weird faery herd, in an angle between the high roots of the tulip tree, where no grass grew in the dense shade.
We collected "lucky stones" -- all the creamy translucent pebbles, worn smooth and round, that we could find in the driveway.
When these had been pocketed, we could still spend a morning cracking open other pebbles for our delight in seeing how much prettier they were inside than their dull exteriors indicated.
We showed them to each other and said "Would you have guessed"?
Squatting on our haunches beside the flat stone we broke them on, we were safe behind the high closed gates at the end of the drive: safe from interruption and the observation and possible amusement of the passers-by.
Thus shielded, we played many foolish games in comfortable unselfconsciousness;
even when the fences became a part of the game -- when a vine-embowered gate-post was the Sleeping Beauty's enchanted castle, or when Rapunzel let down her golden hair from beneath the crocketed spire, even then we paid little heed to those who went by on the path outside.

We enjoyed a paradoxical freedom when we were still too young for school.
In the heat of the summer, the garden solitudes were ours alone;
our elders stayed in the dark house or sat fanning on the front porch.
They never troubled themselves about us while we were playing, because the fence formed such a definite boundary and "Don't go outside the gate" was a command so impossible of misinterpretation.
We were not, however, entirely unacquainted with the varying aspects of the street.
We were forbidden to swing on the gates, lest they sag on their hinges in a poor-white-trash way, but we could stand on them, when they were latched, rest our chins on the top, and stare and stare, committing to memory, quite unintentionally, all the details that lay before our eyes.

The street that is full now of traffic and parked cars then and for many years drowsed on an August afternoon in the shade of the curbside trees, and silence was a weight, almost palpable, in the air.
Every slight sound that rose against that pressure fell away again, crushed beneath it.
A hay-wagon moved slowly along the gutter, the top of it swept by the low boughs of the maple trees, and loose straws were left hanging tangled among the leaves.
A wheel squeaked on a hub, was still, and squeaked again.
If a child watched its progress he whispered, "Hay, hay, load of hay -- make a wish and turn away", and then stared rigidly in the opposite direction until the sound of the horses' feet returned no more.
When the hay wagon had gone, and an interval passed, a huckster's cart might turn the corner.
The horse walked, the reins were slack, the huckster rode with bowed shoulders, his forearms across his knees.
Sleepily, as if half-reluctant to break the silence, he lifted his voice: "Rhu-beb-ni-ice nice fresh rhu-beb today"!
The lazy sing-song was spaced in time like the drone of a bumble-bee.
No one seemed to hear him, no one heeded.
The horse plodded on, and he repeated his call.
It became so monotonous as to seem a part of the quietness.
After his passage, the street was empty again.
The sun moved slant-wise across the sky and down;
the trees' shadows circled from street to sidewalk, from sidewalk to lawn.
At four-o'clock, or four-thirty, the coming of the newsboy marked the end of the day;
he tossed a paper toward every front door, and housewives came down to their steps to pick them up and read what their neighbors had been doing.

The streets of any county town were like this on any sunshiny afternoon in summer;
they were like this fifty-odd years ago, and yesterday.
But the fences were still in place fifty-odd years ago, and when we stood on the gate to look over, the sidewalk under our eyes was not cement but two rows of paving stones with grass between and on both sides.
The curb was a line of stone laid edgewise in the dirt and tilted this way and that by frost in the ground or the roots of trees.
Opposite every gate was a hitching post or a stone carriage-step, set with a rusty iron ring for tying a horse.
The street was unpaved and rose steeply toward the center;
it was mud in wet weather and dust, ankle-deep, in dry, and could be crossed only at the corner where there were stepping stones.
It had a bucolic atmosphere that it has lost long since.
The hoofmarks of cattle and the prints of bare feet in the mud or in the dust were as numerous as the traces of shod horses.
Cows were kept in backyard barns, boys were hired to drive them to and from the pasture on the edge of town, and familiar to the ear, morning and evening, were the boys' coaxing voices, the thud of hooves, and the thwack of a stick on cowhide.