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When I was young, the New York neighborhood I grew up in was in a low spot just off Route 9 outside Wappingers Falls. Really, there were two parts to my neighborhood one to the north, and my part to the south, separated by the woods which sat behind my house. The sections were only accessible by the highway, as there was road between the halves. To make matters difficult, the highway wasn't configured to easily accommodate driving between the two parts of the neighborhood. The best chance someone would have driving from the south part to the north part was the parking lot of the car repair shop that sat between the two entrances off the highway. In many ways, our neighborhood was really two separated in so many ways.

There was a trail that had been cut through years before my time, which with the exception of the deep creek which flowed through the woods between the two sections of our neighborhood, was easily traversed. The well-cut trail made it possible to visit with friends who lived in "the other side" of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, getting to the trail was often difficult there was one major obstruction to the trail: my aunt.

My aunt had lived next door to us from as early as I could remember until the day we left New York. My aunt is older than my mother, her sister. By the time my friends and I ruled the loop of road which was our domain, my cousins were almost all grown up and starting their own lives. For many years, we freely walked through my aunt's yard, which was almost directly behind her garage, to the trail much to my aunt's dismay. At some point, she adopted a rather large dog and had a fence put in, blocking our path to the trail. While it was possible to use her neighbor's driveway to make our way through the woods over to the trail, most of us were deathly afraid of the "older kid" that lived next door. That meant that we had only three other ways of getting to the trail.

These paths were longer and more difficult to travel through. From behind the service station at the highway, we could make our way downhill through a field of pricklers thorny strands of bushes that could easily tear through the thickest shirt. From my house, we could use a trail that was most likely made by one of my cousins, but wasn't a direct shot to the neighborhood trail. We had to jump across the creek, which was probably cut into the ground about three or four feet in that area. We had to go against the grain of the forest, which wasn't easy in a Hudson Valley

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