Sand Spring Lot

I grew up in a magic place. As a child I was convinced of it. After I had left home I chided myself. ”That wasn’t a magic place—just an imaginative child transposing images on an ordinary landscape.” But—glorious revelation—I returned home in the early 1990s and it truly was a magic place.

Come with me to visit Sand Spring lot. Check in first at the little house where I grew up. A white stucco house with three large red curlicues on the roof. To this day I don’t know what those curlicues were for but they made the house a fairy-tale cottage for me. The house was situated on the crest of a large cave. The entrance to the cave was barely crawl space and vine-covered. But if you weren’t mesmerized by the cave and continued just a little ways you came to Sand Spring Lot.

In the olden days even before my grandparents came to Murfreesboro, Sand Spring was a beautiful park. Carriages came often it was said, bringing families or courting couples to picnic there and await the strange phenemom which occurred daily. A gurgle would be heard. Then, to the “oohs” and “aahs” of those watching, a fountain of sand would erupt shooting a cascade of ivory-colored sand three feet high. With another gurgle it settled back into the depths.

By my time “progress” had paved over and stopped up the entrance to the spring and the once pedestrian landscape became a bog. But it too was glorious and magic.

Returning to Murfreesboro after many years I discovered that the city had bought the old Coca-Cola plant on the Manchester Pike and turned it into a child’s Discovery Museum. Just outside this museum an elevated walkway extended. My delight knew no bounds as I followed this walkway and discovered it led through Sand Spring Lot all the way to the back of the little house where I grew up.

To my still greater delight I discovered all the magic ingredients that enchanted me as a child were still here though now I walked above them rather than slosh through the bog. I caught a glimpse of the strange birds I would come upon as a child–large purple water birds, standing statue-like on one leg. I saw the twisting ripples of snakes gliding through the water, the sun reflecting off their shiny scales. Even the remains of the big sink hole was there. Memories of hanging on a wobbly barbwire fence that surrounded that sink hole came back to me. I would gingerly tap a toe under the wire and feel the suction of the hungry sand and jerk by foot back—just in time.

Further on I glimpsed the large stone foundation and I was flooded with memories of this strange structure. We never knew what it had once been but after a heavy rain it filled with water. We called it then our private swimming pool and would splash about in it happily. The stepped pyramid structure which we would ascend to view the entire landscape still stood beside the foundation but now it was almost completely covered with encroaching vines and the strange blossoms of Passion flower

Looking down at all this I could see Sand Spring had become more water saturated since my childhood. I couldn’t have walked through the depth at some places and the very incongruous hill that in my childhood was covered with cactus was gone. Still visible were the big flat rocks where my sister and I lay on our stomachs and caught crayfish from a meandering stream. These rocks were also covered with water. But new wonders had appeared. There was a family of beavers that I don’t recall being there in my day.

What joy filled my heart as I heard children running past me on the walkway—laughing and pointing out wonderful surprises in that still magical place.

Over a decade has passed since this visit. I have not been back to Murfreesboro but I heard that the little house where I grew up is gone and I don’t know if there is still a Children’s Discovery Museum or not. That magic place, Sand Spring Lot is still very much alive but only in my memory.