The Magic of Small, Outdoor Spaces

Between the ages of 3 and 19, I lived at the dead end of a city street. The pavement stopped just past my house. Beyond, a dirt road continued for three additional lots. And then there were woods that, to my childhood frame of reference, went on forever. In winter, a skeleton wall of maple branch and oak trunk, empty chokeberry and dogwood. In spring, the wall grew soft green leaves that became so dense by summer, it seemed I could disappear into another world beyond. There, I was unseen by my older brother and sister waiting on the dirt road, unknown by the adults inside their houses, happy to yell at us, once discovered, to get off their property. My older brother brought my sister and me into these woods—really, no more than a few acres of land between my street and the next—when he babysat us. We spent hours playing adventure scenarios in our private garden. 

The Human Animal

A quarterly column from local fiction writer and lawyer Endria Richardson on the intersection of people and nature in the Bay Area. Find the rest of her columns here.