Behind my parents’ house lies a narrow strip of land—a shallow ditch choked with honey locusts and gnarled maple trees, their branches tangled in a chaos of vines, thorny shrubs, and poison ivy. As an adult, it’s easy to see it for what it is: an untended boundary line offering a modest bit of privacy between two countryside properties. But as a child, I saw it differently. The ditch wasn’t just overgrowth and debris; it was a portal. A wilderness of maybe fifty feet that, in the right light, felt like the edge of the known world. A place where geography and logic gave way to invention—where kingdoms rose and fell, danger lurked behind every tree, and the ordinary rules of neighborhood life no longer applied.

To enter, I crossed a narrow wooden bridge my father had built—a simple span of planks laid over the shallow depression. It wasn’t strictly necessary; the ditch was barely a few feet deep. But to me, the bridge marked the threshold of another realm. On dry days, its height transformed the ditch below into a sheer ravine. After rainstorms, when runoff pooled at the bottom and turned the earth to mud, it became a churning, impassable river. The bridge’s practical use was negligible, but that didn’t matter. It was symbolic. It meant you were crossing over.

Once across, the landscape reshaped itself according to whatever narrative seized me that day. Sometimes, I was a covert operative, deep behind enemy lines, moving with deliberate precision through the underbrush, plastic rifle at the ready, every rustle in the trees a potential threat. Other times, I was a lone explorer charting unknown territories, drawn by the promise of buried civilizations and unclaimed treasure. Soggy, half-burned scraps of paper that had drifted down from the fire pit became ancient scrolls or long-lost maps. Rusted bolts and twisted shards of metal emerged as artifacts—relics of people whose stories I was left to imagine. And when the mood struck, I was a pirate, sword-fighting invisible foes in the thick green wild; the ditch transformed into a remote desert isle. It was, in every sense, a place of invention. A physical space, yes, but more importantly, a blank canvas where childhood imagination had free rein.

In hindsight, the ditch obeyed its own kind of Murphy’s Law: whatever could happen there… did. It was a crucible for childhood, a place where reality bent easily to the will of imagination. Now, I’m struck by how small it looks whenever I return home and stand at its edge. The drop isn’t as steep. The trees aren’t as dense. The wildness I once knew so intimately now seems like simple overgrowth—more manageable, less enchanted. I sometimes wonder if the magic has gone out of it completely—if the worlds I once summoned there have vanished for good.

But when I step into the ditch and let the quiet settle in, the years begin to loosen their grip. And for a moment—without warning—I find myself back inside those stories, moving through the trees with the same fierce belief that anything could happen.