the fore mentioned walk in the woods

i used to know all the paths in the woods at the end of my street like the back of my hand. i still remember them. they all had something different to offer. some gave you a good hour walk through peacefull feilds and tall bushes and/or short trees. another brought you to the middle of a cedar grove that was so thick at the top, all of the vegetayion at the bottom was dead so that you really didnt need paths. one brought you out to the big antenna. one brought you through a muddy path by some old rusted cars that, until recently, i didnt know where it finished. plus countless others that went nowhere in particular except perhaps to a firepit, the likely spots for bush parties probably. bu now they're all covered by houses. and the suburbs expand...

some of the paths still exist, but they are changed. you can now see the houses if you look hard enough through the naked tree branches. you have to ignore the random rock dump offs and clearings. near the park around the block from my house there used to be a drainage ditch. manmade, it was dug into the solid rock almost. one side had more of a gradual slope full of wildflowers or weeds, depending on your point of view. the other side of the creek/ ditch was an 8 foot rock drop, which looked quite like a cliff back in the day. at the end of the ditch, there was a drainage grate that went into a tunnel. water tended to collect here, stagnating into some green-ish slop. this is where we would catch frogs. at a right angle to this, there was another creek/ditch that usually ran dry during the summer. up on side of it the was a rather steep rocky slope and and the forest ended right at its edge. in the spring or fall, the runnoff from the woods would make a cascade of sorts into the ditch. i was our own little water fall. i rember spending a day scalling the thing, cutting off one flow, making another, and just generally getting ourselves filthy. over the years there were a few forts... not many and they never lasted long but a club or secret society usually came with them. i remember once, after a big downpour, a little valley or gulley or whatever, turned into a full pond. i can really remember spending the day, which had been picture perfect sunny, lounging on the big boulders along the side and in the middle of the new pond. the water didnt stay long and every time we would go back after any rain, soemhow the phenomena never repeated itself.

i still remember when they first started building the houses. the amounts of trees completly butchered. there was one along one of the main paths. a white pine, one of the only substancially sized ones in the area. it was huge. perfect climbing tree too. someone had built a ladder up to a small platform at some point. when they started clearing back there, we had hoped that somehow it would make it. but it didnt. during a walk we found it sliced up and neatly piled up along the path, along with all the other smaller trees. it was such a waste. i almost cried whenever i went back there the first few times. eventually, you get desensitized. i still cant help but feel like half my childhood is under the brand new houses with spotless lawns, hardly a tree in sight.

progress, i know. where would we get if we just kept hugging our trees? living all in the same little box? why, that would be ridiculous! i also know that beneath my house, there's probaly someone else's childhood playground. i guess nothing can stay the same forever. eh?

i'm sorry if this was too "melodramatic" or depressing or whatever... i just forget how great that place used to be then suddenly remember. i figure it shouldn't have ALL gone to waste, at least some writing can come from it...