All good things must be regulated ...

Hope and I circumventing rush hour traffic today and took a shortcut through the neighborhood that we grew up in. Driving past the house that I spent 13 years in was bizarre. The people who bought it from us changed the yard, stuck a tacky satellite dish in the center - but essentially it looks the same. I forgot how warm and inviting the house looks in spring and summer, green trees and the iris's my mom planted in 1993. The roads we drove down have scarred me at some point or another. Falling off my bike and skinning my knee. Trying to pop a wheely and skinning my elbow. Playing football, softball, and basketball at the elementary school at the edge of the neighborhood. I had a childhood that I am grateful for - I stayed in one place and had everything I needed, some things I wanted, and the things I neither wanted nor needed but were necessary for me to learn a lesson.

On the main drive of the neighborhood there is a hill with a bump at the very top. Every year on the school bus we would hit the hump and everyone would take flight. To see it was comical - an entire bus of school children popping up into the air at the exact same time - and no one really caring. Eventually though, all good things must be regulated, and drivers were instructed to slow down to 25 for the bump. Buzz kill. My 5th Grade teacher was the first feminist I had ever met, and she was awesome and taught me how to write poetry.

When the county built the school they left a mountain of displaced dirt and soil in between section 6 (where my house was) and the school. Eventually over the years everything settled and this mountainous hill became the perfect sledding site (and general year round danger zone). Nathan and I would go every winter, taking sledding to a new dangerous level. The one day, of the one year, I took my little sister along (out of all the years I had gone) - she cut her leg (scratched really) and that was the end of my winter fun. But eventually, all good things must be balanced, and it was bulldozed for new houses.

I chased my golden retriever through that neighborhood, learned to drive on the roads (and some ditches). I had my first kiss in that neighborhood, my first concussion (all the way through to my 13th). I spent 12 years of school less than 5 miles from that house, gained and lost friends, decided not to take up smoking at the bus stop like everyone else, chased my black lab through the muddy creeks and woods. I had a basketball hoop on the front of the garage, you should have seen my mom's face the first time I accidentally hit the car - twice. I became this person, in that place.