A Childhood Place

When I was young, maybe seven or eight, my parents took me, my little sister, and my baby brother to this beautiful place in upstate New York. It was a small clearing among the tall, thin trees at the edge of a lake. There are tons of lakes and forests up in that area, but this particular space was really special because it was so quiet and peaceful. It became "our place," and the location of some of my earliest and most cherished childhood memories. Our friends, who were two sisters the exact same ages as me and my sister, would often come along with us to this place that we believed to be only ours. My parents would spread out blankets and bring picnic baskets brimming with sandwiches (crustless for the kids, of course) and blueberries. My dad and our friends' father would deal out our snacks, and my mom would bounce my little brother on her knee as she listened to our friends' mother reminisce about the "good old days." Then all the "grown-ups" would lean back on their elbows and just talk as the sun went down, sending a warm, pink and orange glow over the shimmery surface of the lake. My sister, our best friends, and I would scamper off into the trees, grinning, as we played hide and seek and then, my personal favorite, "Detective." In "Detective," we would all pretend to be Nancy Drew and tip-toe around feeling the bark on trunks and digging holes in the soft soil with sticks as we scoured the place for "evidence." Finally, as the sky darkened to a shade of eggplant, we would emerge from the forest, cheeks flushed and hair wild. As our parents packed up the blankets, we would attempt to skip rocks across the shadowy face of the lake. The place was wonderful and somehow magical, for everything seemed better there: the air was cleaner and fresher, the trees were taller and thicker, and the sunset was more vibrant than ever.

Recently, I went back to "our place" when I traveled upstate to see relatives. As I grew older, I had spent more and more time in the City due to school and my parents' work. The second I could get away from the house, I jumped onto a rusty, old bike from the garage and pedaled up to the little clearing. When I got there, at first, I thought I was in the wrong place. The hundreds of trees were gone; they had been completely cleared out to make way for a huge complex of houses, and dark, smooth driveways had been rolled and hardened over the moist, brown soil. The loss of the forest was so jarring and devastating, that for a moment I was speechless. It didn't seem possible that this much destruction could have occurred in such a short period of time. The houses were sharp and angular, and the once gentle, softly glowing strips of radiant color from the sunset seemed to cast sinister blotches of hard, bright light across the brick and wood. Everything was so exposed and big and sharp that the effect was overwhelming. The trees had made us feel secure and cocooned in our little safe haven, but they had been savagely chopped away. The air was filled with the sounds of cars and machines, so different from the perfect silence, shattered occasionally by the chirping of birds, that I remembered. I realized that, subconsciously, I had kept the shining memory of "our place" in the back of my mind to return to when the world seemed so void of fresh air and soft light and quiet moments. When I closed my eyes, I could, just for a second, be back in a place where I could just hear and smell and be one with nature. The fact that I cannot seem to find a place like that anymore makes me wonder if it even exists.