Since we’re about to visit a memory, detach your mind from its tangible confines and bring with you only your senses. Also, you’ll have to remove that cloak of maturity. My special place is not for adults. Regress through the years and stop anywhere between eight and eleven.

Walk with me up this hot, sticky, asphalt road snaking up the side of this mountain. My grandfather owns thirteen acres along this road.

Right here, where the woods end and the tall hedges begin, is my grandparents’ home place. Look up at those hedge bushes. They seem a mile high. And there’s my grandfather in his holly green service station uniform with those giant scissors trimming the hedges in the tepid summer evening. He likes them flat on top with rounded sides. I’ve seen them thick with shiny green leaves that I would pick and snap between my fingers, and I’ve seen them almost bare, struggling to hold up a white layer cake of snow when winters chose to have it.

We could keep going up the road, and it would take us to the driveway that forks off to the right and curves up to the hilltop where the house is, creeps across the front yard, and escapes the hill in a long, straight decline that comes out behind us. A way in and a way out and both ways were used for either. But here, where the hedges part, is my favorite way in. These rough, concrete and gravel steps massaged our bare feet and made little red dots on our butts as we sat on them and played in our summer shorts.

The “our” I’m referring to are my two sisters, Sheila and Laketa, my aunt, Mona, who is nine months younger than me, and I. We were yard kids. We hated to play inside. We found fun in every inch of this yard. That cluster of mimosa trees, curling and bowing their trunks like ballerinas just ending their dance, are just right for climbing. A giant oak tree that shaded half the front yard and pulled all its roots up above the ground like a hundred knees, gave us cavities and crevices, creating marvelous landscapes for tiny toys. This was our kingdom; these steps, the palace drawbridge; these hedge bushes, the sturdy fortress walls.