My son is leaving for his freshman year of college and I am feeling maudlin. I listened to this show I made years ago and it made me feel better. So before August is really, really over, here are the kids of Hospital Hill.
Description: The kids of Randolph, Vermont describe their neighborhood as a place with three purple houses. They tell me there’s a shortcut through the woods down to Dunkin’ Donuts, and they say it’s pretty close to three graveyards. The kids run in twos and threes and sometimes in one big pack for a game of hide and seek tag.
I spent an afternoon talking with them and following them around. This show is a little taste of that day. It’s a postcard from childhood, a place we remember but can’t visit anymore.
Thanks
Thanks so much to Kelly Green for introducing me to the kids and letting us camp out upstairs for an entire afternoon. Thanks also to Tally Abecassis, Mike Donofrio, John Schak and Larry Massett.
The children’s recorded voices are so charming and take me back to when my own kids were that age – what a wonderful way to capture what they sounded like, how they breathed, what they thought about, how they played with each other, what they thought the future might be like for them. Thanks, Erica, Debbie
I grew up playing kick the can in an old graveyard near a small lake. We used to climb two giant boulders nearby, in an abandoned quarry. We called then Jupiter and Mars. I loved hearing your whispered hiding-place strategy, the frank difficulties of being a seeker, and the aspiring farrier feeling the pull of family history… such gorgeous reasoning, insights and sincerity. This is the first piece of yours I ever heard and I was so psyched to hear kids voices on the radio and their lives being taken seriously… Honestly, I was thinking about this exact show just the other day when I was talking with a friend about youth radio. What a treat to revisit the kids of Hospital Hill.
‘Such gorgeous reasoning…’. I could not agree more.
Thank you so much for this heartwarming piece which brings back such nostalgia and memories of the rules of play for a lil girl in a neighborhood of kids in the Berkshires.
Oh those games, the excitement and fear.
I go back to the eyes of the innocents who took in so much of our grown ups lives.
And then, my kids roaming the hills of Woodbury in packs, with sticks and tricks.
August is a strange month full of farewells and the delight of a summer well lived and loved.