I went for a walk today. I retraced the route that my siblings and I have followed for twelve years, except for in reverse. And, as I walked, I pondered the past.

It started with a palm tree. Nothing unusual about it, just one of those palm trees that looks like a pineapple with hair. Except that it got me thinking about things - about the other two thousand times I'd walked past it. I felt the warm sunlight around me, trying valiantly to counteract the winter chill that has settled over my home area. I saw the scattered leaves, only now beginning to fall, although Autumn is long over here. I saw a few brown needles off a tall pine. And I began to walk, slowly, looking at things I haven't thought about for years.

There's that little grove of scrub bushes - dead now, but once green and cavernous to us as we were. We would climb in among them, after the rains had filled a drainage ditch that ran under their branches, and build green forts and tunnels amid the green bushes until our parents reached us and we had to leave. We were happy, then. But it is all dead now - brown scrub skeletons of green tree forts, and no branches catching the flow that once was there. I can stand next to those bushes that once held five of us chattering kids, and I can look over the top of them… And I wonder what I lost between then and now.

Then I wander onwards, and I see the little hollow in the corner of the road down which we used to scamper with our old dog. It wasn't much - just a clifflike grassy hollow - but it was fun then, and we used to dream of going further down into the valley and wandering through the culvert that runs under the road… Today, there is still some grass in the little hollow. It still lies there, connecting two roads and providing a "shortcut" for any who would try it. But the dog is dead. And we who once ran up and down that path are now too old for those nonsense. And I look, and I think about what I lost between then and now.

There is, in the valley, a little stream - it runs through the culvert, and was once covered by towering trees and hanging vines. We would run down there, with our father, once - and gaze in awe at the trees and the light sifting down through them, and at the huge brown trunks of ivy-infested giants. We would scamper through the brush, avoiding patches of poison ivy, always going downhill - lost in our own little world of running water and singing birds… Now, there are fewer trees there. A blackened stump, with small branches sticking out in odd directions, does not serve to hide the streambed from view. Not that there's anything to hide - the stream is as dead as the tree, and any poison ivy that once lived there is there no longer. As I contemplate this, I imagine what happened between then and now.

And there were the little golf balls we used to find in the meadow by our house - small round white ones, and the ones with red ink still on them were highly prized by me and my siblings. We would look for them as we frolicked, collecting dozens of them each time (although we never stopped to think where they were from, and I still don't know today). There was a bit of old wood and metal connectors there too, amid the tall grass of the meadow; and we used to imagine that there had once been a tall train trestle running through the valley, carrying expensive goods to and from the nearby city. We were foolish - it is no such thing, just an abandoned piece of wood from earlier times - but we were children then. And we would go wandering among the two boulders in our orchard, and the many below us in the valley, and we would chase squirrels, ourselves, and lizards. The lizards were many - scaly, frightened things, with blue patches on their bodies and pulsing

throats - and we would catch them and keep them and they would eventually be let go or die, and we would catch another, or perhaps the same one again. We would chase them with sticks to poke them out of crevasses in the rocks - only one got in and not out, and he is still there today - a scaly skeleton under a loose slab of rock, the stick used to pry at him marking his grave. But no longer. We are too old to be scrambling around the rocks chasing scaly creatures, and the lizards have some rest. And I watch them on the rocks, and I wonder why what happened, happened.

A forest covers the valleyside by the road I am now walking on - a forest of old bushes, long since dead. We used to run through them, finding old bags, and maybe a metal car part or two, discarded among the bushes. And there was a clearing in that forest, a clearing of bright red earth where water eroded it - that, at least, remains to this day. We used to call it the Spoon, Fork, and Knife, after the way the little water-valleys appeared, and we used to explore it together - we were the denizens of that clearing - its only occupants, and its kings. We would leap, like human gazelles, from bump to bump, claiming ownership of whichever we got to first, then leaping to another and claiming ownership of it instead. But we are too large to do such things - what has happened between then and now?

Another corner is rounded, and beyond that, I can see the second culvert, through which we used to climb with our father - although he was too large to do it properly - and look up at the sky through the drain. That culvert was fed by a little pond across the street, where we used to go to visit. It was, once, a wide watery domain, surrounded by cattails and water reeds and rocks. We would sit on the rocks and watch the ducks and frogs' eggs in the water, and we would take the tadpoles from the pond and cart them home in jam jars. But not now. The pond is a desert now - a maze of crisscrossing cracks in the mud which once formed the bottom of the pool. The ducks are long gone from the pond now, and no frogs live in it. It is a haven for mud fleas, and frighteningly alien worms which can live in the dry ground, amid the dead cattails. And I don't know what happened, between then and now.

The final corner - across the way is a clump of honeysuckle. We used to take its blossoms, and not care whether it belonged to someone else - it was good, and we ate from it at will. Another neighbor family lived on a hill nearby ours, and they had a huge tennis court, surrounded by green fencing, and a pool in the back. We were there when they built their spa, and we disturbed a snake among the bricks, and ran away. We were on good terms with the children of that family, back then. But they moved away, and a succession of new families followed, whom we have seen but rarely. We don't go over there now. Do they know what happened between then and now?

And I return to my own driveway and start up it. I have forgotten many things - the way we played amid the trees at the bottom of our driveway when we were young; the way we used to build houses among the three-foot-tall grass by our own house, and crawl along tunnels in that grass, and chase each other. We used to have four trees out front, but they are all dead now, cut up for wood and the pieces left where they stood, once. The artichokes by the lawn are gone, and the lawn is dying, and the cactus are spreading from their garden by the willow to take over the yard. Our gardens in back are dead, although my sisters have a new one in the orchard, and the slimy black frogs from the ditch are dead too. And, as I reach the door of my house, I know what has happened between then and now.

Drought.

And I am sad, for the losses, for the past that never shall return. And I am happy, in a way, to be leaving my home soon and starting my own family. And perhaps someday, when my children return, there will be laughter in the little valley, and among the cattails, where we once played. And maybe then, what happened in the past can happen again.