English 100
18 September 2013
Serene Tranquility No matter how old we get, catching minor cases of Alzheimer’s disease, there will always be that one childhood memory that will never seem to fade. That one motion or quick smell of a breeze can take you back to that place you have been longing and just for an instant, you are. Now for me, it’s not a manmade place; it’s one that men actually tear down: a sycamore tree that once stood at my childhood home. I truly believe that as the roots of this tree grew, so did my imagination and my yearning for adventure. It actually didn’t dawn on me how much this tree was a big part of my childhood until I saw that it was gone. At that moment, I felt that longing to go back. Nowadays, you have to prey kids off their video games to play outside. But when I was growing up, it’s all I knew. Living in a gated community, there weren’t many things to do, so my sister and I had to find entertainment for the day. For some reason, that always led us to the sycamore tree a couple steps from our house. There was nothing too special about it, other than the fact that it was the best tree in the complex to climb. It had the best spots for your hands and feet as if it were made for that exact purpose. Eventually, we would find ourselves just hanging down from the tree, discovering new routes to climb up the tree, and thinking of activities to do with the tree. I can’t speak for my sister, but for me, it was a place of serenity; a place that we could call our own. As my sister and I got older, there was talk between my parents that we were going to move into a bigger house. My sister being older than I am, she was excited for a bigger room. But I was still fairly young, where big rooms didn’t faze me at all. This was where I grew up, made my friends; everything. I was probably the least excited about this move and once again, I found myself at that sycamore tree. It always gave me a piece of calmness running through my body. As if when I stood there, everything else around me was a blur and I can only feel the breeze of the leaves swaying back and forth as I stood underneath it. I suppose it gave me this feeling because it was sort of like my home away from home. A place I can go when things got rough in my real home but still feel safe. But at that moment, I didn’t get that, I got a feeling to where this move was actually going to be my reality and nothing would be able to change that. Ultimately, I started to accept the fact that I was going to move and thought of an idea for my sister and me to do for a last hoorah before we left. So we got a box full of all our favorite belongings, memoirs from different places we had visited throughout the years on our family vacations, and finally, we wrote a little note pretty much just stating that: we were here. We decorated it and put our last final touches on it and went to the perfect spot to bury it; our sycamore tree. We got a huge rush as we dug deeper and deeper, hitting rocks that have been embedded in the