Moving for the First time
I moved from Reisterstown to Ellicott City, Maryland, and before the big day came, my parents drove me to my paternal grandparents house and dropped me off there for a few days. I was all of two years old at the time, maybe even younger, but the drive from Reisterstown to Hagerstown was about one and a half hours and the change in scenery could not have been more drastic for me. From the suburbs of Baltimore to the rural environment of western Maryland, I enjoyed myself thoroughly on my first adventure to my grandparent’s house for the first time. I felt like I was finally growing up and that my parents recognized this, but then when it was time to take me home things started to change. We took route 70 east all the way back to our new house, but the drive was considerably shorter (by at least a half hour). When we exited the highway, we did not end up in the urban sprawl of Baltimore, but instead a lightly wooded suburb full of houses with stars on them and emerald green lawns full of bushes and dogs. When we finally pulled up to our new house, my grandparents picked me up and carried me inside to my parents. I happily jumped out of my grandmothers arms and ran to my parents to embrace them and pleaded, “Please can we go home now?” but they just chuckled and insisted that we were already home, this is our new home. So when the truth finally sank in that my parents had duped me into leaving our old house and moving into this empty, scary, probably-haunted-and-riddled-with-monsters house, I decided I had had enough and was going to make it to the place I considered home no matter what. I ran to the closest door, only a few steps away from our back door, before I came upon the basement stairs; not unusual to someone else, but to me, it was a flight of stairs that went straight down all the way down into a dark, carpeted basement, and I stood there screaming at the unfamiliarity of everything going on around me.
Vacation to Maine
When I was in second grade, for our spring break my mother’s oldest brother decided that he was going to take our family and his family on a vacation to the wilderness of Maine. I believe I was all of seven years old at this time, but the prospect of getting in the car to drive for almost half of a day blew me away. I was full of questions: could the car make it that far? What does the world look like in Maine? Will they know how cool my dog is? Saying that I was ecstatic is an understatement, and everyone at school that would listen to what I had to say got to hear all about how I was going to visit Maine and play with all my siblings there. When the big day came, we met my uncle at his apartment complex outside the Baltimore Harbor and we parked our cars in his complex’s parking garage, exchanged kids and luggage, allocating each car with one or the other, and then heading out. It was a wonderful northern-bound trip; I got to read the Far Side almost the entire way up, laughing out loud with my older sister and yelling things like “Altering baby!” at my uncle. He promised me two things would occur when we got there; no parents, and no bed time. When we finally did get there, both of these things still existed, but I was amazed by the volume of the wilderness that surrounded us. My parents threatened that bears would eat me alive if I wandered away, something they still laugh about to this day, and I remember discovering wild strawberries for the first time, eating toast that was only covered in garlic (a cruel prank played on me by my uncle), watching my mother’s father put out a candle by placing a glass cup over it and hearing one of the first truly terrifying vampire stories ever told to me by my Aunt Andrea. To this day, I’m still haunted by the memories of a nightmare I had in the small cabin we inhabited on our vacation where I have to rescue all of my drowning family members from beneath the dock we used to dive into the water every morning at sunrise. Interestingly enough, this was on the lake where they shot the first Friday the 13th movie.
The stream in the middle of the ravine
Normally, I was a rambunctious child and I enjoyed every moment of it, earning the moniker “The wild child” from my grandparents. So naturally, when my best friend Ryan moved to a house in the middle of the woods, surrounded by more woods, surrounded by farmland enveloped in more woods, I was ecstatic. And if you think I was a bad kid, Ryan taught me everything I know about the art of misbehaving. After our first trip to his uncompleted house, we had years and years of plans ahead of us to fulfill and nowhere near enough time to finish everything. When he finally moved in, I waited anxiously as my first planned sleepover at his house approached. My first night there went pretty well, we watched cartoons and ate dinner, played with his younger brother and got chased by his older brother, played super Nintendo and went to bed. As soon as we woke up in the morning, we grabbed to two biggest buckets we could find in his garage and took off straight into the woods, losing sight of his house in a matter of minutes. We ended up at the small creek that has since run dry at the edges of his property, replaced now with an oily sheen-covered skunk cabbage marsh. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before in our lives, so right away, we went to work. We caught more frogs than we could imagine, covered ourselves in more mud than our mothers ever thought was possible and the newts and salamanders we worked together to catch were our most prized possessions. We threw everything into our buckets; rocks, moss, dirt, sticks, it did not matter, and when Ryan’s parents awoke to find us missing, they panicked. I remember standing in the middle of the deepest part, hoping to catch a turtle or two, when I looked up and saw the natural waterfall that the roots of all the trees around us had made in the middle of this creek. Amazed by what I saw, I decided I had enough and began to rummage through my dirty bucket, grabbing handfuls of loot (or salamanders) at a time and admiring the vivid colors each was marked with and how untamed they all seemed. Just then, Ryan’s parents came screaming through the woods. At first, they were worried that we had run off without paying attention to where we were going, but when they saw us they began screaming in frustration because we were both a mess. That was the beginning of our countless beautiful journeys into those woods.
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