nostalgia.

I remember growing up in the country of California- a free spirited little kid who would wear white stretch pants and white turtlenecks and white keds just because she hated jeans. A little girl with a probably much too vivid imagination with about a billion imaginary pets. A little girl who grew up in the company of her siblings instead of "fast friends." A slightly hippie child who always seemed to be outside.

The time that I didn't spend outside, I spent inside ruining a lot of the stuff I owned. Not in any big sense, I'd just make small alterations to clothes and toys I had so that I would still be able to wear them, they'd just make me feel a little bit yucky knowing they weren't new. That happened to a lot of my stuff. I really hated some of the clothes I made myself wear; the only clothes I can remember involved something about how they made me feel weird. When I look back at kids today, I wonder if they have those crazy outfits that they hide from their mom behind nooks and crannies in their room because they stuffed them there while pretending to clean. I wonder if they have that pair of shoes that they, at one point, decided would look much better with a bit of nail polish on them. It's hard to describe those memories, because they are so weird. I can't quite verbalize the feelings elicited by those weird clothes.

Another thing that goes along with the old days is the cramped feeling created by a constantly messy room. When my room isn't messy, it's usually cluttered- it has been my whole life. Call it my pack-rat nature, my inability to follow through on initially ambitious plans to thouroghly clean out my room, or just general laziness, but it's always the same. Many of my childhood memories involve messing things up so that they had to be cleaned again. The only time I never had to clean up was when I was outside. Perhaps that's why I played outside so much. You can't really mess up nature in the same way you can mess up your room. The messy room thing has another facet by which it influenced my need to be outside. I always got some weird feeling hanging over my head when I'd be in my room- like I was supposed to be cleaning it. When I was outside, I'd be free of the confines of my stuffy, psychologically damaging room and as well as the stuffiness of the rest of the house in general.

That's why I like spring and summer so much. They allow me to be outside in the big room that I can never mess up. I can sit in a hammock and listen to the wind blow in the trees and smell the fresh air. All this glory as opposed to sitting in my always-on-the-edge-of-being-messy room breathing the stuffy air that's been recycled through the vent a billion times listening to the sounds of everyone else doing something mundane.

If you wanted to, you could connect it to my feeling of responsibility for keeping the environment clean. It's different than cleaning a room, it's like preserving something that has been integral to your development since childhood. I honestly can't imagine a day when I'd rather be in my room than outside.