This Perfect Thing

As we age, I think everyone begins to forget who they were as children. Sure, I’ve retained important memories, but I can’t say that I have held on to exactly how certain moments made me feel as a child. Susan Orlean’s short story captures the age when people begin to view the world as adults, but still maintain an imagination that has not yet soured to cynicism. Orlean’s final paragraph leaves a lone adult standing at the edge of one boy’s imagination, watching the stars twinkle off of an elaborate child-built spider web. “Now I have this perfect thing,” the little boy declares, “and the only one who knows about is me,” he says as he walks inside, leaving the narrator behind (Orlean, page 9). In this final paragraph, Orlean illustrates where I feel all adults stand with their childhoods. As a little girl, my brother and I dominated our large backyard. We had a trampoline in the back, and when we jumped high enough, we could see over the fence to our neighbors’ fort. We would go back and forth for hours talking with one another and making plans to play soon. This was our spider web. This was a world that our childhood imaginations created and we were the only ones involved. I don’t live in that house anymore, and that place and time are both gone forever, but that doesn’t make our thing any less perfect. I remember the grass between my toes and the blackness of my feet after being on the trampoline. I think the web represents the elaborateness and sacredness of our childhood imaginations and the things we created with it. Now that I am older, I don’t have a trampoline anymore and my neighbors don’t have a fort, but when I close my eyes, I can see their little foreheads peering over the fence and that moment is this perfect thing that we created. All I can do now is look back at that time with wonder and gratitude, like the narrator who watches the lights flitter off of a fishing line.