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It's beautiful. The sky is so blue there in the summer, and even though it's sweltering, the woods are always cool and shady, and I'd walk with Mikey and Benton and sometimes my dad all the way out to the swamp. The colors...burnt orange sodden brown flaming red lurid shaded subdued standard a thousand different shades of green, colors so fluid words don't work for them and pictures don't capture them right. Birds sang overhead, not the cheesy way but loud, raucous, sometimes grating. Insects sang everywhere--wasps, bees, crickets, katydids, cicadas, June bugs, flies, millions of gnats and mosquitoes.

You'd start out on top of the hill on a path wide enough for a car--wider still once my newfound neighbors forced a backhoe down it and upped the grade, a tragedy, a loss I'm still saddened by. We ran down that hill, we raced. Laughing, yelling, panting, red faced and grinning. He beat me, usually. Long-limbed and skinny Mikey, head shaven, wearing his dad's old Led Zeppelin shirt. I was small for my age, determined not to wear anything remotely feminine, my hair cut short and carelessly parted. I had dirty knees and grimy hands, but I was happy. Happy the way only a 10 year old with the best yard ever is.

We got older, explored every inch of my land and beyond, walked out so far that the woods stopped and we were at the edge of a field of cattails, my dad holding me back with one gentle hand and breathing, "Look" as a single buck bounded through the swishing stalks, head held high, white tail up in surrender, the velvet still furring his horns. And at night, when the moon hung huge, white, luminous in its cradle of stars, the woods were never silent. In summer the frogs were so loud Benton couldn't sleep and Mom's relatives asked what was going on when she called them on the phone. Bassy bullfrogs, defiant peepers. Crickets sawing away to make a symphony, our symphony, the one I laid awake to in the dark, warm beneath the cotton sheet, Pooh clasped against my chest.

I was so positive I'd be there forever. So sure I would always climb those crooked apple trees and eat blueberries until my tongue cringed from the sour and play with kittens my mom warned me not to name so we wouldn't get too attached. I was so sure I'd always be the owner of that big blue house with the cracked, crooked driveway, lumpy yard, leaning woodshed, outdated kitchen, and fantastic basement. Change was for others, not for Grace, so sure, so stubborn, so young.

But even while we were there things shifted. They cut down half an acre of trees to build a house just off of my sacred wooden path. I was so angry I cried, yelling at my dad that they couldn't do that, it wasn't right. The scarred stumps of oaks and maples cut me, bruised me. I hurt for the woods, my woods, the same way I do now to remember that after we left, the logging continued, the paths were swallowed up, the beautiful cherry tree that hung over our driveway was torn up and hauled away, the house painted a lighter blue. 26 Miller Road, Preston, CT, 06365. Not mine, not anymore. But oh, the memories. Beautiful. It was beautiful.

And now I sit in the dark in the room of this house, a young house, and I look out the window at the silhouette of tree branches against the bruise dark sky, at a silhouette so similar to the one I knew before, but a thousand miles away. And I mourn what I had, what I lost, the people I've forgotten and let go, the ones who are growing up apart from me with lives of their own, once intertwined with mine, now separate. I love the ones I cannot hold and ache for the past. For one more summer day, please God.

One last day.