by Rachel Degennaro

Created on: July 04, 2010

There is a memory that I cannot forget.

I grew up in a small neighborhood where everyone knew each other by name. To an adult it was a charming subdivision, but to a child, it was a kingdom. As a child, my best friends and I explored that neighborhood from top to bottom. We skated up and down the streets, sat in wagons and used the handle to steer ourselves down hills, and we built magnificent forts in the woods and declared we would live there for the rest of our lives. Of course, when the lightening bugs came out and our parents called us inside, we quickly retreated into the warmth and shelter of our homes, but I forever have a mental image of that muddy clearing, the tall sticks propped up against each other that formed the walls to our fort, and a circular room with the walls made of thickly twined vines that we called the “vine room”.

At the end of one of the roads that branched off from the main one in our subdivision, there was a gravel road. A sign hung on a tree that read, very clearly: PRIVATE AREA. NO TRESPASSING.

Cassie and I walked past that sign without a worry in the world and down that road, singing “When I Think About Angels” by Jamie O’Neal at the top of our lungs. I remember how warm the sun was as it radiated against the crown of my head, and the feel of the hot gravel against my bare feet. We dreamed there was a mansion there with a secret prince living in it. We dreamed of riches and giant swimming pools with fountains. We simply dreamed, because we could. The world was limitless.

We never made it all the way down the road. We always backed out halfway down and ran home.

In 6th grade, I moved out of that house and across town. It’s been five years since I lived there, and six since I played in my kingdom. I drove back there last month, in my own car, and it was one of the worst experiences of my life.

It was small. In my memory, the neighborhood was limitless. But as I turned into it, I noticed that it really wasn’t as grandiose as I had thought. As I slowly drove down the neighborhood, I trilled off people’s houses in my mind: there’s the Pink Lady’s house, the Graces’ house, The Andersons’…

When I got to my old house, I found my stomach twisting uncomfortably. The beautiful tree that was in my front yard that I climbed innumerable times was gone. My mother’s blue hydrangeas were gone. The house was a different color and the bushes were gone. My

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