I watch as they play together, close in age and interests, not yet separated by school or friends. They race at each other on their bikes, veering before the crash and laughing hysterically each time before winding up to do it again.

For a moment I go back to my childhood, days of green and gold in the prairie grass

Laughing and riding bikes with my brothers through summers that went on forever

Our world was so small then, only as big as the places we’d been, the boogeyman just a story we were told to send shivers down our spine

My monster was Jenny Green-teeth, a witch who lived in the trees and came out at night. She would eat children with her green teeth, the price of not brushing twice a day. 

I invented her to scare my  younger brothers, but secretly ended up afraid of her myself.

Louder noises break my reverie, and I look back at my children.

Laughing and fighting in equal measure, each breath changing the tone of their interaction. Now howling and barking at each other, a small and hairless wolf pack.

What will their memories be? Is this the moment that will stick, a perfect harmony between heart and mind, the remembrance they discuss  when they reminisce over coffee in forty, fifty years?

Life isn’t always easy or enjoyable, but those aren’t the times I go back to. Instead, it’s the lazy summers of childhood play,  when anything was possible in your small corner of the sandbox and the world was in harmony.