For me, it’s the woods.
I was born here:
Clearly, trees are in good supply. But I didn’t grow up there. At least not at first.
I moved a lot as a kid, but somehow, the forest always moved with me.
Until 3rd grade, I lived here:
It’s a dead-end street with little townhouses. At the very end of it, there was a fence with a door in it. The neighbor kids and me used to sneak through and boom, we were right amidst the thicket.
A small river, rocks to toss, trees to climb, man, this was paradise. Since the garden of each house was really small and separated only by hedges, we always crawled through to end up on each other’s back porch.
We moved again when I was 8. Another dead-end street, just no neighbors with kids this time:
Luckily, our tube-shaped garden made plenty of room for playing hide and seek, cops and gangsters or other imaginary good vs. evil games.
My room was in the basement and had a window at ground level, which meant I could climb out and be, once again, right in nature.
Awesome!
In 2003, we moved for the last time, to here:
Within 300 feet of my house, I can take a stroll through the woods, which I always do, almost every day, whenever I’m home.
There’s so much beauty, so much life, so much mystery in the forest:
- The smell of fresh, wet grass.
- The chirping of the crickets in the bushes.
- The many rodents and small-sized mammals going about their business behind the next slope.
- The birds chanting, waiting, sitting high up in the trees, ready for their next swoop at any second.
- The scurrying army of insects, managing and maintaining the restless ground.
- The sun breaking through the treetops, feeding the plants below just enough to keep them reaching higher.
- And of course, the dream of hunting like Katniss in The Hunger Games. That never gets old.
When I was younger, I always wanted to live at the beach. I don’t know why.
I guess you can’t really know where you’re going until you embrace where you came from.
