Escape

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My thirteen-year-old has discovered Narnia. Not in the books. The actual place. I'm told I should be jealous. I'm not sure how jealous I should be because I haven't been admitted to it yet. But my sister says it's her new happy place and my husband says seeing it made him mourn a childhood spent in a concrete suburb. Like I said, I haven't been invited, so I don't know.

But I can guess. Narnia is what the neighborhood kids in the know call the wooded area just down the road and around the corner. For living in a planned community, we kind of do have access to some cool nature-y kind of stuff.You can see Narnia, that skinny amoeba right smack dab in the middle: 
That green smudge? A little piece of paradise in our Stepford streets.
I kid, I kid. It's not Stepford-y around here at all. It's a fun, down-to-earth place. And so is where I grew up. A bunch of houses with a splash of nature right in the middle. It was a huge field behind the tract houses across the street. The utility company owned it but they never did anything with it. So people put in gardens and we ran wild back there between rows of beans, snitching people's dewberries and chasing snakes.
In Narnia, it's wooded and you have to scramble down a steep embankment and follow a couple of trails to reach it. There are some 18-year-old hipsters building a tree house. They've even painted a sign politely asking fellow wanderers to treat it with respect. There are BB pellets everywhere. And I think an old sofa. And my kid is working on a rope ladder for the tree house. And maybe a way to run an old-school film projector off of a car battery to watch movies projected on a sheet. I think that's the plan, anyway.
He comes home muddy and happy. I love where I live. 
Today you can check out Lexie's review over at The Book Bug blog. I admit to ten deep, dark secrets by myself. So you know, go gawk.