Seventy years ago, when I was five, my family moved to the leafy village where I would do most of my growing up. Right around my milestone birthday this year, I was visited by intense visions of my dearest childhood places. Certain trees. Certain rocks. Certain brooks. The visions were so strong that I felt I was there, in that particular there where kids live their secret kid lives.

In the village of my childhood, kids ranged free and feral any and everywhere, or as far as a twenty-pound Schwinn bike would take us; and our parents, secure in the knowledge that we were safe somewhere or other, and probably would not die, volunteered and sat on committees to elevate Village Life to near-unbearable levels of bliss.

Our Village, as the denizens loved to call it, has had many names. First it was called ‘Ossininck’, then Philipse Manor, also Scarborough, Sleepy Hollow, Whitson’s Corner; until it was incorporated in 1903 by its Founding Father and officially named “Briarcliff Manor.”

The Founding Dad was one Walter Law, a British immigrant who, having worked himself up from an impoverished door-to-door rug salesman to a partner in a prestigious company, threw it all over to become a gentleman farmer. At the turn of the twentieth century Law bought up most of the land that comprised Our Village, named it Briarcliff Farms, farmed the hell out of it, and built a house called “The Manor.” In 1902 he opened a monster Tudor Revival luxury resort hotel called Briarcliff Lodge (the biggest, best, and only hotel in Westchester County; and the only one equipped with a docking pole for dirigibles, should one ever fly to the Lodge. None ever did). The rich and famous came flocking to the Lodge to escape the heat of the city and stroll on its manicured grounds and golf links.

Being a philanthropist and a savvy businessperson, Law donated a gorgeous Tudor Revival railway station to Our Village, so that when theVanderbilts and Roosevelts and the royalty and other important people embarked from the train at our village, they knew they were in for a fabulous Tudor Revival time. Law then went on to donate the school, the town parks, and the first-ever public swimming pool. He also endowed the Congregational church and put a Tiffany window into it. Consequently nobody raised a fuss about the vaguely British name Law chose for his model Village. He was Lord of the Manor, and everyone was happy.

The pretty railroad station, the pool, the parks and the Congregational Church and its mesmerizing window, were all magical parts of my life as a child in Briarcliff when I lived there forty-three years after its naming. Built to last, they still exist today. The stupendous Briarcliff Lodge, which I saw exactly once, burned to the ground fifteen years ago.

I didn’t know any of this fascinating Briarcliff history at first because I was five at the time. What I knew was, there were briars. There was also a cliff, a monstrous massif one running north to south the whole length of the town. This steep hill once separated the rich from the middle and lower classes. The wealthy claimed the highlands– where they rusticated and played golf at the Lodge, or built their extravagant summer homes.

The farm workers and other ordinary folk lived at the base of the hill, in the moist bottomlands of the Pocantico River. We thought we had the best of it down there: the school and the pool and the Fire Station that blew its whistle every day at noon, and Pete’s Soda Fountain and the Rec Hall and Library. That was where ordinary Village Life took place. And did it ever.

Briarcliff was made for kids. When we weren’t courting death by tearing around on bikes, climbing into the swaying tops of trees, or fishing off the very dangerous railroad trestle that spanned the Pocantico, forming secret clubs (The Stargazing Club. The Indian Club. The short-lived but thrilling Lurkers Club, whose mission it was to peep through people’s windows after dark. Punishment was swift and harsh), or building hideouts, or joining neverending contests of one a cat or hide and seek, we partook of that organized, abundant Village Life, designed to keep us in a state of perpetual excitement.

Among the civic activities that our parents planned for us: swim lessons and tennis lessons at Law Park, the town variety show, concerts, town and school field days, visiting attractions (Rex Trailer and his Wonder Horse!) fairs, Firemen’s bazaars, flower shows, pet shows, junior church choir, fire engine rides, community sings and outdoor movies (Follow the Bouncing Ball! Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn!! all projected on the school wall!) ballroom dance classes at the Rec Hall, parades (Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day), Brownies, Scouts, and Junior Audubons. Everybody in every class did all these things together. You had to be there, and we were. Village Life was full to the brim with fun.

I thought everyone in America lived like this. It was a long time before I found out how wrong I was.

By the time I had settled into this mad schedule of delights, Village Life was undergoing changes. Mythical Briarcliff Lodge had become a private school campus, the uber-wealthy had sold their country houses to developers, and subdivisions began to sprout up on top of the big hill, the one-time playground of the rich and royal.

During Briarcliff’s housing boom, forests and meadows I considered to be mine were leveled for split-levels and ranch houses, and many more kids came down the hill to our pretty school (kindergarten through twelfth grade). At first I hated them. They cut down the woods for these jerks? The grief I felt over losing my sacred places was bitter. I can still taste it today.

A new school was built. Then another. More wild kid habitat had to be sacrificed. Trees fell. I could not be consoled.

Somehow a few sacred spots were left untouched, and are untouched still. The marshier sections of the Pocantico, where it oozed under the railroad trestle, became a Nature Park. A thin strip of forest on a steep rocky flank of the hill, known to all kids as The Little Woods, remains. I can see it on Google Earth.

Other mysteries survive as well. The romantic ruins of a stone coach house on Pine Road made me think of carriages and trotting horses. Then there was the huge brick Wall on Scarborough Road, sporting signs in raised brick letters that read “WALDHEIM.” I always yelled the name aloud (‘Walled Heem!!’) on the days I drove with Mom to pick up Dad at Scarborough Station. She lived with it.

But what was Waldheim? Who lived on the other side of that long, high wall? It took me decades to find out, but finding out was great.

James Speyer was a German-born Jewish New York banker and philanthropist who built a monster Tudor (of course) Revival villa and model farm, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, for “Our Crowd” to visit and admire. “Our Crowd” were wealthy German-Jewish people from the City. Perhaps, or certainly, they were not welcomed at Briarcliff Lodge. Mrs. Speyer was a New York socialite, and an animal rights advocate who provided her own personal ChowChow dog with a chauffeur and a maid. Life was lush, until the stock market crashed. The whole gorgeous domain was demolished and subdivided in the thirties. The Wall still stands , and I know how to pronounce the name now, too. I like to think that the magical life of pampered pets, maids, financiers, and manicured landscapes still goes on at Waldheim, as the ghosts of Our Crowd cavort on moonlit nights.

There were lots of ordinary middle-class Jewish people in Briarcliff. I did not know who was Jewish and who was not. I am happy to say that my mother, raised to be an anti-Semite, befriended the good Jewish ladies of Our Village through her work in Scouting; and thus was washed clean of her distrust of Our Crowd. One of her fabulous friends (my Brownie leader) contributed generously to my musical career when we were re-united by chance three decades later.

Our Village was white. We all looked the same, I thought, except for the Ghiazza kids in the summer, all of whom were lifeguards at the town pool, and all of whom bronzed up with enviable Italian suntans.

No visible black or brown people lived in Our Village. In the glory days at the Lodge, the black golf caddies who lived on the hill were forbidden to come down the hill to shop, or, God forbid, to hang out at the park or the pool.

The only black people I saw were the garbage men, who swore ferociously and bared their terrible white teeth at our dog, who was swearing ferociously and baring his terrible white teeth at them.

They were tough looking guys, and my mother and I were afraid of them, and the dog knew it, and that’s as far as we got with race relations in Briarcliff. My mother’s anti-black-people feelings ran deep. Even Scouts did not help. A troop of all-white Brownies did nothing to inspire her to love her fellow man regardless of their color.

Where did these black guys live? Ossining, maybe, or White Plains or Mamaronek. I didn’t know, nor did I care.

There were so many things and people in the wider world I didn’t care about, being far outside my charmed circle of privileged, exciting jam-packed Mayberry whitegirl Village Life. I roamed where I pleased, sledded and skated biked, camped out, learned the waltz and the hokey-pokey, played with the neighborhood gang (me and seven boys) and decorated my bike for yet another parade.

I wanted to be a kid forever and ever, but in the sixth grade the inevitable thing happened. The cool kids separated from the uncool kids. The girls stopped playing baseball and football and turned their attention to their clothes, hair, breast development and of course, boys. The boys withdrew in alarm and joined organized all-male ball leagues. Dance classes gave way to Junior Rec dances, where the reluctant boys had to ask the same girls they had viciously tackled in football games only last year– yes those selfsame girls– to dance.

These excruciatingly embarassing events were written up afterwards in the cool kids’slambook news-sheet: who had danced with whom, who was noticeably absent from spin-the-bottle, who wore the wrong kind of clothes or had bad hair. Ancient friendships dissolved, malicious cliques were formed. Suddenly Briarcliff’s sweet tendency to do everything together morphed into the misrule of the cool, and their commandment to join the rush to puberty, grow some breasts, or be forever damned.

I was damned. I was a loser. I was shunned and mocked. I found consolation in solitary rambles in what remained of the woods and fields, and in horseback riding lessons, books, music, and a few loyal loser friends. But I felt the real sting of being outside of things after having been so deeply inside. Here was the dark side of Village Life, the strict mandated conformity. I was twelve, and my perfect kidhood was over. I moved to New Jersey.

Google Earth shows me that the golf links on the storied heights of Briarcliff Manor are now the Trump National Golf Course, and heaven knows what sort of plutocrats and gangsters high-rollers hang out up there, and heaven knows how Village Life below has adjusted to the looming Trump presence. Everything may be different now.

I still dream about going back home to walk in the woods, sleep in a puptent in my back yard, climb a tree or take another forbidden dip in the Pocantico. My Briarcliff house is still there. I could just move back in.

Of course I never dream about the home I have made and lived in happily for over half my life. I suppose it’s because still I’m here and I need not yearn, just wash the dishes, tend the garden and run the Roomba. I have been many places and met all manner of folks in my life and I know that I really don’t want to return to the insularity of Village Life in Briarcliff. But the intensity of memory, and the enchantment, remain.