Noelle Sickels Historical fiction Historical novels Historical fiction about WWII Historical paranormal thriller Teaneck NJ in the sixties A Child of Air Out of Love The Shopkeeper’s Wife The Medium Walking West In domestic Service Zone 3 Barefoot Productions Time Was Reminiscences by senior citizens Noelle Sickels Poetry Noelle Sickels Anthologies Noelle Sickels Memoir Searching for Armando

 

A Child of Air

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Plot Summary

Noelle as a little girl

A CHILD OF AIR is a detailed portrait of a particular place and time — a single block in suburban Teaneck, New Jersey in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. It’s a memoir-in-pieces, built of scenes and stories. The author interweaves personal memories of her street’s residents and their dramas with elements of local history and reflections on the vagaries of memory itself — how memories carry the past into the present, and why some events and personalities remain vivid while others blur.”

 

A CHILD OF AIR is likely to provoke readers to recall and measure their own youthful joys and worries, their own backyard stories, the neighbors and experiences who shaped their unique childhoods.

 

 

Hatching the Idea

The story in my memoir, SEARCHING FOR ARMANDO, so personal and so complicated, had taken years to research and a certain kind of resolve to write. After it was published, I felt “finished” with writing altogether. I made no grand declaration, and I continued to attend meetings of my long-time writing group. I even produced a few short stories and some flash memoir pieces, but I wasn’t interested in tackling anything larger, and I was content to abandon my writing desk for months on end. p>

 

Then one day, I felt moved to write about the street on which I grew up, the same street on which my mother had grown up, and her mother before her. I lived on Terhune Street from age five in 1951 to 1964, when I graduated from high school and left home for college. Wondering how well I could actually recall my old neighborhood, I made a rough map on a piece of scrap paper. I drew little boxes for houses and labeled them with family names, and I added some adjacent streets in order to include the corner store, friends on other blocks, the elementary school, the park. As I sketched, full-fledged specific memories of specific people blossomed in my mind. The impulse to write about them, and about my young self among them, grew stronger. At last, I had a project that would not let me shirk, one that led me to think more deeply not only about the people in my past, but also about the mysterious workings of memory.

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