Now and Then

     June 19, 2003
I love Saturdays. Especially this one. I just got out of school yesterday. Now I'm done with fifth grade. I am gonna be in Middle school next year. I am going to go to Shivela with Caleb. That will be awesome. Now I have two and a half months to do whatever I want. I'm kind of sad that it's raining, but I can still play with Caleb and Kyra. We made a fort on the bunk beds and had a toy war in the loft. Maybe tomorrow it will stop raining. Then we could have a war in the backyard.

     March 27, 2013
That is me as an eleven year old, writing my feelings about the first day of summer ten years ago. Okay, in all reality I was never good at keeping a journal so I don't have an actual excerpt for you to read, but that would probably be how it sounded, if not a little longer and better flow than I would have written. Sad, huh. Oh well, I was eleven and language arts was not my favorite. I enjoyed science. Don't worry, I'll translate what I meant.
   I was probably sitting at the desk by the window that overlooked our backyard. It was in the master bedroom which, in our old house, was never actually our parents room. My dad built a series of four bunk beds on one wall and a loft jutting out from the top bunk. It was pretty much the coolest room ever. It was my sisters' room, but I loved that window. It overlooked the backyard. The dirty, somewhat shabby, but awesome backyard. We didn't have a lawn back there. As far as I can remember it never looked like a nice, pretty yard, but it was functional, and perfect for a bunch of kids to play in. We had a tree on one side, a trampoline in the middle that was buried down to ground level, a basketball hoop closer to the house, the remnants of a vegetable garden opposite the tree, and a playhouse in the back at the bottom of a slope. If you can't see what was so great about this yard either I'm not explaining it right, or you have totally lost touch with childhood.
    In the rain I could smell the wet bricks from the patio/basketball court. It was better than wet cement. The whole yard became a swamp on those days. I looked out and could see the patches where the water would gather and imagine how deep those puddles were. The trampoline was the best; the rain could come down from above and up from beneath for maximum soaking. The small plywood house was a shelter from the storm (which was pretty much any time it rained harder than a light drizzle). I would look out that window and see a whole summer ahead of me. At the time, it was a fantastical mystery to be discovered over the next two months.
   Knowing what I know now, that window was a portal to adventures with siblings and friends acting out our favorite movies and tv shows, creating our own adventures in other worlds complete with several scrapes and bruises. It also was a picture frame for moments that nobody ever thinks to take a picture of because they don't need to. The kinds of things you just don't forget, like walking in circles for hours with your older brother, sometimes talking and making up stories, sometimes both in complete silence. Or the time that I threw a football with my mom on her birthday, because she wanted to spend some time with me. I look back and remember some of the best times I can think of, and it makes me sort of sad that their over, but then I look out this window and see a whole new mystery to solve in the coming months.