Sweet Summertime

I love the outdoors, don’t get me wrong. I probably spent half of my life outside so far. So it’s not that I didn’t have any experiences with nature, it’s that I had so many that it was hard to narrow down my favorite. Then a scene popped into my head and I couldn’t believe I forgot about in the first place. My problem was that I was trying to think of places I visited, places that struck me as beautiful and pure. My memory happened to take me a little closer to home. When I say closer to home, I pretty much mean my backyard.

The best part about being a child is your imagination, and the lengths it goes to for you to experience what you set out to experience. When I was little, the field behind my house was my playground, my restaurant, my home, and the list goes on. I spent hours there, with my sisters, my friends, or alone; letting the tall grass consume me for hours.

The field was a never ending blanket of yellow and green blades of grass, emerging from every direction, but when the sun hit the grass, it looked multicolored. I jumped to see where it ended, but every time I jumped, it seemed to go as far as my eyes could see. The entrance to our field was at the very back of our yard, the trees and bushes framed it perfectly making it look like a door way.

Every summer, my sisters and I used to go into the middle of the field and make a house. But our houses didn’t consist of actual materials; we entered the field empty handed. Who needs supplies when you have an endless imagination? We patted down the grass to make a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and three bedrooms; one for each of us. If we were feeling like a wealthy family that day, we would even pat down a pool or a massive deck. We would lay there for hours, staring at the translucent sky, discovering different shapes in the clouds and seeing who could make up the best story about them. In these days, our expectations and imaginations were limitless.

The tall, multicolored grass was soft, except for the very tip, which was pretty pointy. When we ran through the field, we could feel how thick the grass was around us. It provided me with the feeling of reliability; I knew it was there and it wasn’t going anywhere. It wouldn’t change if I left and came back the next day; it was familiar.

When the sun was hot, it emphasized the smell of grass. It smelled of the neighboring field’s horses. It smelled like memories, familiarity, and comfort; like everything else around you didn’t matter. If we decided to bring lunch, sandwiches and cookies mixed into all of these smells.

Besides our echoing voices, you could always hear crickets chatting back and forth. Despite these things, it seemed as though the field was soundless, like I was being consumed by a comforting silence. Not a creepy uncomfortable silence, but one that I was excited to hear again.

But as I grew older, I started to realize that I could see the end of the field; it was no longer everlasting. It was then that my visits came to an end. But whenever I experience one of those senses, it brings me racing back to the times when nothing mattered.