A 1951 photo of Lillian Smith in front of her 17 Brook Lane home.
Click on picture to enlarge
By LILLIAN SMITH
It's been 46 years since I've lived on Long Island and yet it remains the most pervasive memory of my past. There is something so special about the Island for me--particularly Levittown, a town that absorbs you and keeps you in its grasp forever.
When you return for even a short while, it's like no time has elapsed at all--as if the life you lived back then was an alternate life. Perhaps everyone has that same nostalgia for the place where they grew up, and maybe that eerie suspension of time is just a universal longing to return to an era where everything seemed safe and possibilities were endless.
I remember Levittown now, more in the abstract than in the opaque reality of movie theaters, beaches and childhood friends. Although all of those things comprise the water-colored memories of the way we were (to borrow the corny lyrics of a Barbra Streisand song), I see Levittown more as a painting where the colors merge into the image of my past as a whole. And I miss everything about it.
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Lillian Smith is a 1962 graduate of Division Avenue High School and a long-time resident of Connecticut. She is a regular contributor to our blog.
2 comments:
Lilian
I lived on Barnyard Lane so I know your house. I think that was the perfect place to live as a child and the memories are great. I've written many stories about Levittown and given them to my children because they will never know the joys we knew back then.
You can read some of the stories at my blog www.levittownstories.blogspot.com
Beautifully written. Lillian! Kathy Stahlman zinn, '63
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