When your childhood doesn’t leave you, sometimes it lingers in a backyard, a road, or a very tall tree. The place you grow up in has its strings still attached to you. If you visit, you might remember what it was like all those years ago to stand in that very same spot.
My spot was the neighborhood of Crystal Lakes, South Reno, where trees of all kinds still line the streets and little streams cut through the grass all around.
The homes here are built for single families — kids growing up and going to schools around the area. The streets are lined with signs to drive by slowly. It’s a pristine suburban neighborhood on the surface, and yet, every place has layers that you might miss from one quick glance.
At this time of year, the leaves have fallen and piled on the paved roads, but the trees still keep their reds, yellows, oranges, and greens, like no leaf has fallen at all. The neighborhood was founded about 30 years ago. Now, it consists of 175 homes, each one nestled into the greenery. This is the pull of the neighborhood, to walk out your front door and be surrounded by green. My house, where my mother and stepfather still live, is one story — roses growing by the front porch and vines creeping up its pale blue walls. Right outside, a plum tree towers over the spot I park my car, and the plums fall down and splat on my windshield.
I usually go home with a piece or two of this plum tree after visiting my mother. In all these years, at least, I never tracked one from the yard to her carpet. I always made sure to check the bottoms of my shoes, or else I’d be spot-cleaning it.
In my elementary and middle school years, my friends were steps away. One across the street, one down the street and into the cul-de-sac, another just to my right, one to my left. It was like we all were in cahoots beforehand and convinced our mothers and fathers to live by a crystal lake (really, it was school zoning). We would take out my tall friend’s red wagon, taking turns being yanked around in it until we got bored. Then, we would take pictures of everything all around us—the dandelions, the leaves, the streams, the birds, sometimes our Converses (which were all dirty), and the sky. The sunsets were so breathtaking, and they still are. The neighborhood felt like a bubble of pink and orange. I never noticed sunsets like that when I stepped out of the bubble. After we’d gotten enough pictures, we’d climb the tree right by my blue house. It was probably the most climbable tree there was in all of Crystal Lakes, with a lower branch for lounging and a spot at the very top where you could nest like a bird.
We would make laps around a small loop of sidewalk, which took us down the main road of Country Estates Circle. Right by the little gated section where people parked their trailers we found a plastic bottle cut in half and filled to the lip with a dark yellow mystery liquid. What could that be? We laughed for hours.
This is where my mother and stepfather started parking their trailer when they got it. They were no tent campers, and so my sister and I shared in this luxury. One day, the trailer was there, lying dormant. The next, it was gone. The lock on the gate was cut. Out of all the trailers parked in their spots, this one was the most desirable. If anything, it was put to great use — dog hair everywhere, two foreign chairs, boxes of clothes, and a black hair extension hanging from the bathroom medicine cabinet. There were other things there too. The people who took the trailer had piles and piles of stolen documents.
My mother got the trailer back. She only said she was sad to see it happen.
Back the other way down that road, right by Country Estates Court, is the lighthouse, built in 1985, one that you aren’t allowed inside. It stands by the lake, which is not crystal at all, but a muddy body of water that is not lacking in its own sort of charm. We went over there to the lake, pre-pubescent and stupid, and made friends with the geese.
This isn’t the only lighthouse of Crystal Lakes. The other is one of my favorite streets in the whole neighborhood: Lighthouse Lane.
It seemed like everyone lived here, and that included my father, who lived on Lighthouse Lane before my mother moved in with her new husband down on Whimbleton Way. I was younger, maybe five. We occupied a two-story salmon-colored house with two big, black doors. This house was full of hardwood floors and spiders, but most importantly, it came with a little creek outside to its left. Sometimes when I walk by the old house, the creek is dried up. Sometimes, it flows. I know that it used to be filled with crawdads. We would catch them (really, we would pick them up by their tails, look at them for a good second, and put them right back), and I was always careful to watch their pinchers, or else I would not dare step foot by that stream again.
Through a nostalgic eye, it is the ideal neighborhood to be in. The community is kid-friendly, quiet, peaceful and beautiful. The ideal neighbor is the kid next door or their mother, the well-off family, but it’s not a neighborhood that college kids could afford to live in on their own. Casting all of my memories aside, if I could move here by myself I would in a heartbeat. For now, it stays just out of reach.
The neighborhood of Crystal Lakes pulled everyone in my orbit into its grasp. My childhood there was wrapped up in exploration, in nature, in wildlife, in long walks and long talks. Everywhere I live in Reno, I feel like I take a piece of it with me to wherever I go next. This is a good piece, with all its quirks and its beauty. It stays with me.
Reporting and photos by Joss Higgins