I love it here, and the warm weather, and the beach with the colorful seashells. But I didn’t grow up here. My memories are tied to another place, where I learned how to ride my pink bicycle, and how to tie my tennis shoes with floppy bows that were as long as a rabbit’s ears. My childhood memories were centered around a house on top of a large hill, half of the year surrounded with lush grass, and the other half with sparkling snow that crackled when I breathed it in. In my mind’s eye, the forest next to the house was frightening, but somehow it still beckoned my siblings and I to explore it, to create winding trails among the briars that scratched our skin and tore the clothes, and to nail a couple of small boards on a tree and proclaim the flimsy tree to be a “tree house”. Right next to the edge of the forest stood our garage. One summer, my sister planted sunflowers right next to that old, dilapidated garage. For the whole rest of the summer they lazily stretched back, blinked slowly at the sky, and smiled a golden-toothed smile.

Summertime would find my siblings and I staring at the slow, huge, passive cows, sold by my neighbor for beef, that dwelled across the forbidden fence. My sister once wanted to touch that electric fence, and after warning her about what would happen if she did, my dad told her to try it. She confidently stepped forward, and the next moment, she was bitten by the stinging fangs of electricity, her hair sizzling and crackling from the bite. After that, we could only stare longingly at the brown and white monsters, never daring to get close to the silver, static-filled snake that separated us. In the yard beside the forbidden fence, I would sometimes sit in the green sea of grass and gaze at the sky, oftentimes the color of a blue jay’s feather. My little corner of the world, shared only with the walking beef, was a glass snow globe that allowed me to peer at the rest of the world without being seen. The sky had a strange, spherical shape to it, and on a cloudless blue jay’s feather day, I always wondered if my snow globe could get picked up and shaken carelessly like a baby’s rattle. Would the walking beef float around like the snow in the snow globe, or be anchored to the ground, forever chewing their cud?

The winter season always bonded my little brother and me, as my older brother and sister were too grown-up to be associated with us. The snow crunched as we both walked down the hill, and even squeaked if we turned our snow boots just so. A thin ribbon of a group of trees separated our driveway from a sheer, fifteen-foot drop-off, so naturally, curiosity drove my brother and I to determinedly test its limits. A decent fort, worthy to house the Texans instead of the Alamo, was once constructed precariously over the edge, teetering towards the road paved below the cliff. The smell of the salt spread over the ice-covered road, combined with the cold air crackling in my nose, energized my little brother and me as we packed snowballs hard as rocks that could be tossed through glass. Our ears rang with the rush of blood and fear when the angry man pointed up at us; his sleek, shiny silver van marred with a slight dent the size of a tennis ball. Despite the frosting of snow on the ground, my brother and I felt quite warm after racing up the hill, with our boots hopelessly slipping, and our jagged breathing that felt like somebody was scraping our throats raw with a piece of cold metal. Our guilty consciences were wet, smothering blankets for the remainder of that day.

Of course, I no longer live in that house that perched on a hill. I could no longer create snow angels or men in the crackling cold air. The endless blue ocean that reflects the sky has replaced the white, unmoving one that I used to glance out at through the window on a Christmas morning. When I go outside, the whispering knee-length grass no longer greets me. Instead, a spider-web of streets and roads intercepts me as I go about my day. But sometimes, a memory still interrupts me as I continue to live my life. Every once in a while, I lean back and relax, and smile at the sun with my pearl-toothed smile. The little piece of the world I call mine still has a snow globe sky.