Sometimes I relive walks down Mexico Lane, the dirt road that I grew up along. Come with me as i walk that lane, under the trees, along the flat parts, past the swamp, over the creek, down the steepest part where the trees loomed tall overhead and the sky was closed off.

Mexico Lane begins at Barrett Hill Road, a rough but paved country road; it starts with a little uphill climb about 50 feet long that peaks and lets you down by Mrs. W’s house. If it is fall there will be apple’s fallen from her apple tree that hangs over the road. You can pick up apples off the road and eat them, but it’s hard to find ones that are not cracked and might have yellow jackets feasting inside them. But if you pick one up and throw it up to knock down a good one from a branch, Mrs. W. will come running out of the house and yell at you. 

The road is now very flat and curves left into the woods for about 100 yards. On your left the woods drops off into the swamp, on the right it rises up a hill. At the end of this flat promise the road starts falling down in a series of downhill-then-flat-then-downhill descending swoops. The trees start to close in over head as you walk down.

Down a few swoops you might wander down the hillside towards the swamp. And there, if you look carefully around the forest floor, you might find green plastic toy soldiers, which you want to collect and take. But you see that nearly all of them are broken and it dawns on you that this is the place where the son of the very old couple who live in a shack near the swamp, a New York City policeman, would come an practice shooting his pistol, blasting away at the toy soldiers. You shrug,shake your head and walk back up the hill onto Mexico Lane, and keep wandering down.

Soon you come to the place where the creek goes under the road through a bridge of big stones and steel pipes. The creek drains the big swamp and then rushes down alongside Mexico Lane. You make a note that it would be great to build a big dam in the stream, with rocks and moss and sticks like big brother Fred does. (Until these dams start to flood people who live across the swamp on Barrett Hill, who then come and tear apart the dams.)

You would soon pass the entry from the road into one of our farm fields, the one we call the Brook Field, as it borders the brook. Sometime we will walk all the fields together.

A bit further down the swoops end and the road just goes downhill with no flat spots to rest on. And then it passes – strangely – our paved driveway, rising up very steeply on the left and you can just see part of our house up that drive way.

But you keep going down to the very steepest, darkest part of Mexico Lane. On the right the creek runs deep over rocks and fallen trees. But on the left side there is just a little rivulet of water running in a tiny roadside gully of mud, perfect for making a series of tiny little dams which fill with muddy pools, unless you break the top one and then water runs down and breaks all the little dams you built.

A car or truck might come down the road and they might not even notice that a little boy is building tiny mud dams in the gully.

This is the part of the road where it is darkest and coldest , with a north facing slope on the right side, a place where the snow and ice last the longest, long after our southern facing fields are starting to turn green in spring.

Then the road starts to level out and there is a house where the summer family comes to stay sometimes. But this is still a dark and cold place, with trees overhead and that north facing hill behind. But the stream has turned quiet and pretty and they have a little wooden bridge that you walk over to go visit.

But just past that summer house is another house where an old woman lives. She has a hunch back, and we are all afraid of her and hardly ever see her. We walk past that corner quickly.

Then there is a smooth flat section of road that turns out to be a place to learn to ride a bike. First you coast down the little hill into the flat spot, standing on one pedal to the side of the bike. Finally you try riding for real, with feet on both pedals. It is a gentle, safe place to teach yourself to ride.

The flat section then rises up a bit to Bobbie’s house, above the road, on the left. The overhead trees open up more here.

Then the road flattens again as it take you to the farm house of the two couples who share the mink farm. The corner of their house on the left is barely a few feet from Mexico Lane. The mink are in cages below the road on the right and they are a mystery. But there a peacocks that wander around, show off, and screech aloud at times. 

Past the mink farm the road wanders downwards past a few houses left and right before it joins Hitchcock Hill for a few hundred feet before that road joins HIll Street. 

Unless you visit Mary’s house on the right with her big raspberry patches or the Russian couple on the left, it will be time to walk all the way back up Mexico Lane, back to your house on the paved driveway, up in the sun, where the house and the barn rest between the fields.