Memories of Fort D

In May 1974, three months before my 9th birthday, my newly-divorced mother and I moved into the attic apartment above my grandparents' house on Elm Street, just down from May Greene School.

We called it the Fort D house.

Our first day in the attic, Mom and I dug our quickly-packed, crumpled clothes out of the IGA bags we'd stuffed them in, sorting and folding and stacking, desperate to create order out of the chaos of our lives. I remember looking out the window, with its clear view of Fort D. "Look, Mom," I said, hopeful. "Kids are playing dodgeball."

The lawn beckoned play. And over the next few months, Fort D became my happy place in the midst of so much sorrow and instability.

Instability, we know, can be both emotional and concrete. The places that hold the memories of childhood can be houses, schools, ballfields, the local Dairy Queen. But there are also the Fort Ds of our lives, and they nurture us along the way, too.

Which is why I was both relieved and thrilled to read that so many good people are fighting for its preservation. "The forgotten park," Fort D was called in the October 27 issue of this newspaper.

Not forgotten, I assure you, by me.

I am over 50 now, and I have not lived in Cape for 30 years, but Fort D still means a great deal to me, and to my history.

Back in 1974, my grandparents, Red and Ann Brockmire, were renters, and often on the move for more affordable rent. But that summer their Fort D rental house served as home base, and our days ran on a predictable, military-like regimen. Grandpa worked mornings in his garden and spent afternoons on the front porch swing, doing puzzles. Grandma walked to Womack's Drug Store to meet neighbor ladies for a cherry coke and, afternoons, watched her CBS soaps. All while my mom, working mostly nights at the Hosiery Mill over in Jackson, slept.

I did my best to be no trouble, invisible. To stay out of everyone's way.

That summer I played a lot of softball, dodgeball, hide-and-seek, and war games with the local kids on our little field of dreams, Fort D, and tried to fit in.

The fort meant joy and play and new friends. The fort meant belonging.

Some days, like if it was raining and the grounds at the fort fell empty, I would take my stack of library books -- Nancy Drew mysteries, the Little House series, Black Beauty, Aesop's Fables, Heidi -- out on the front porch and sit on the swing with Grandpa. I could imagine myself as Nancy, off to solve the mystery of the old clock; Laura Ingalls running in the Minnesota fields with her dog, Jack; Heidi, living high up in the Swiss Alps (wherever that was) with her grandfather, far, far away from Fort D.

City manager Scott Meyer acknowledges that Fort D does not date back to the Civil War, but concludes it is "historic in its own right" even though "there are purists who think this should have never been built, that it is a distraction from the pure history of the site."

The purists are wrong.

My grandparents are long gone. Their Fort D house is gone. My mother is gone. But Fort D, with its sprawling lawn, remains, and I am eternally grateful to those on a mission to preserve it.

I live far away now, and when I am homesick for my family and for Cape Girardeau, Fort D fills a pure place in my memory, my history. As something more solid than clothes stuffed in IGA bags. As my field of dreams park. As the playground that offered safety and stability to this once, 9-year-old, child of divorce, looking for a place to be.

Teri Carter was born and raised in Southeast Missouri. Reach her at tericarter.net/contact.