I never had my own room, so I let my imagination happen outdoors. I went outside to find ladybugs, practice cartwheels, to play house, and to make mud pies. The backyard was my childhood sanctuary.

As a child I needed a place to just be a child—a place that was in the outside world but kept me from all the negatives of the outside world. A place where the fresh breeze of the air would flow through me and let my mind go crazy—just as a spinning windmill. I guess that would be the start and place of the endless thinking I have today. I would say I was fortunate to have all the time in the world in my backyard. Others that age were intertwined with TV and video games while I choose to run crazy in my own open field. Without the use of mindless gadgets when I was a child, I feel my brain developed maturely at a younger age. I was given a chance to learn little life lessons in that back yard, ones that have helped who I have become today. As I got older though, the backyard and I grew distant.

But now as I stand in the center of the lavish green grass that was only a vast field of dried weeds and dirt when I was child, I realized that a lot has changed. That tree that rose high above the land is only a stump; the corner garden that beamed with beauty is only a memory. That play center that I spent hours enjoying, was only remembered by the indents left in the dirt, and that wide field of plain, shrank to a small space of green grass. All renders of change. And now as I turn around in that place I once knew well, I feel like I don’t know it at all.

I stare for my small wild hair and bare self only to see the green grass. And as I walk away I feel as if a small part of me was still here.