Favorite Childhood Memory

Fall was always my favorite time of the year since I was a child: the crisp, colorful leaves that littered the ground; the smell of campfires and grill cooked food filled the air; pumpkins littering the front steps of houses everywhere, and Halloween decorations being put up. Enjoying pumpkin spice everything became a habit of mine around this time. A lot of things came with fall that I typically don’t get to enjoy, and many of these things faded out of my life over the years.

My favorite memory of fall is the fort that all of the children in my grandmother’s neighborhood had put together. We spent hours hiking around the woods, dragging all sorts of trash that littered the ground back to our little spot hidden among the trees. We had found

I remember sitting by the window, clutching a flashlight close to my chest in excitement as I waited for it to get dark. The moment the sun disappeared, I would throw the front door open and yell goodnight to my grandparents, since they were settling down for the night. All of the children would rush outside and meet at our “spot”, which was the swingset in Carter and Ava’s yard. We all would wave around our awesome flashlights, chests puffed out in pride. We then would proceed to fight over who was on what team and which team had to be it first. We always had enough people to split into three teams of two. The team who was it couldn’t use their flashlights, so it would be harder to find people; once they found both teams they could use them, since they would have to tag everyone in order to win. There was one moment Chrissy, my teammate, found what she had claimed to be the “perfect” spot; we had to climb two trees alongside each other and duck down so we wouldn’t be too visible. In our minds, this seemed to be a decent plan, but it wasn’t. The smell of tree sap, hundreds of splinters in my hands, the crunching sound of the branch as I fell back towards the ground. In the end, I was the first to be tagged as I sat beneath a tree, covered in tree sap and splinters, leaves all through my clothes and hair. I smelled like tree

Since I would spend the weekends with her for the longest time, from Friday to Sunday, we would have time to spend together. During the fall, october particularly, all of the Halloween movies would be marathoned on T.V. all month. Grammy would cuddle up in the recliner, me on the couch, and we would go through the stations and find a movie to watch. We would enjoy all kinds of snacks, usually either some kind of fall treat, or fresh fruit. We would stay up late, the living room now scented like oranges, or pumpkin, and enjoy the movie that was playing on what used to be ABC Family that night. Hocus Pocus, Halloweentown and the rest of the series, and the entirety of the Goosebumps series were among our favorites. Over the years, this happened less and less, and I got more and more distant from my own life. This was the moment when I finally fell completely on the outside of my own life, as if I were watching my own life on a television, with no remote control to change the settings or fast forward. I was no longer content when fall came around; this was when fall finally