In a time and a place many years ago, we played some neighborhood games.
I had essentially just moved here. In a house at the edge of a main road, the noise from cars rushing by a thin window easily disturbs a second grader, who then chooses to sleep in a different room instead. The two sisters in a different townhouse down the road were now far away.
Therefore! The only solution is to find other people to bother in this new neighborhood.
Early in the beginning, it's Halloween and I bump into a boy from my class. Later in the future, I meet a sister and her older brother who are decidedly much more calm and well-behaved than my brother and I. Up the road, up the hill, many years later, I slip sticky notes with silly drawings of a character from the video game "Among Us" under a pretty girl's fence. I spend time in someone's basement, someone's treehouse, in the woods behind a park, making up games and secret bases, pretending to be spies, characters, secrets, and I walk up the hill again to climb a tree, walk into someone's backyard to climb another tree, drowning in summer's brief yet torrid laziness.
A passed early childhood is an interesting thing. We make up stories and I forget them. We create Minecraft worlds and I forget them. We invent personas and time goes on and I forget them. Eventually, showing up at each other's doors on a whim becomes a thing of the past. Would it have changed anything for me to know that our neighborhood games would eventually become a dust-sheathed memory?
I guess it's okay to look back on a happy innocence every once in a while. Sometimes, though, I wish we hadn't forgotten our neighborhood games. I think I'm still unable to let go of being a child.