Editor’s note: As part of Xpress‘ annual Kids Issue series we invited readers to submit past stories from their childhood in WNC. This is one of several entries.
by Deborah Austin
Many childhood memories are of wandering familiar lands and roads of Riceville and downtown sidewalks. My brothers and I were free to explore the three home acres and visit relatives nearby. We had to stay together and behave. Reports of any waywardness would fly home, even before us.
The woods offered adventures on a flight of fancy. We dug a spot in the pine needle carpet seeking gold. A circle of trees became an audience for the psalm just learned in Sunday school or Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “The Swing.” (“Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing/ever a child can do!”) Our own rope swing led us to reenactments of scenes from a Tarzan movie at the Starlite Drive-In.
Double features took us downtown for Saturday matinees at the Imperial Theatre on Patton Avenue. Admission was bottle caps and cheeseburger wrappers. Parents left children at the door while they shopped at local stores including Fain’s, Bon Marché, The Bootery and one of the three national “five-and-dimes” downtown. Mother often went grocery shopping at the A&P on Lexington.
Other special stops were Pack Library on the square, the Asheville Art Museum in the magical stone building on Charlotte Street and Colburn Mineral Museum on Coxe Avenue where I discovered fossilized sharks’ teeth. That exhibit led me to a life of wandering beaches searching for a new black triangle to add to my fossil collection. Closer to home, I still enjoy a wander to the downtown library and any circle of trees.
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