Prewrite+1

Selena Mayer P3 Prewrite 1

My place is a backyard. The backyard is from a house I moved out of in eighth grade. There were three trees in the yard, a maple with a piece of rope so old the three bark grew around it, a cottonwood tree, and another maple tree. The large cottonwood tree is gone. I remember when it still stood. The cottonwood tree smelled of decay and had to be cut down. The tree's seeds were fluffy and light. The trees in my backyard have a lot to do with the sky, and the sky has a lot to do with the mountains. There was a small garden next to the brick porch, bluebells and the occasional tulip grew there. They made that corner of the yard smell like pollen. There was a birdhouse on the windowsill above the garden, and one day when I was walking through the garden, a sparrow flew out with a soft swoosh and brushed my face. In the fall, the leaves from the trees landed on the grass with a soft rustle. The sky in my backyard is an ocean, blue tissue paper, a viewpoint. I remember crawling under the bushes in by the back fence pretending they were a fort. Another detail that stands out was that fact that our next-door neighbors back fence didn't meet with the fence behind them, so if I managed to crawl through the bushes, which made the river rocks grind together, I could stand in between the two fences. On one side of the house, I colored random bricks blue with some chalk. It never did come off. I remember in the winter sliding down the small hill on a sled, and then trying to crawl up the hill using just my arms while still on the sled. There were some wild raspberry bushes, and the raspberries were very sweet and tart. The Maple tree was good to climb, and from the top I could see the Dairy Queen at the edge of the neighborhood. The view of the mountains was also very good. It was very windy at the top, and the branches were smaller, so I was always scared that the branch would sway and break. I would sometimes shout down from the top of the tree to the people below and watch them trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. Occasionally a giant weed would grow on one side of the yard and would be almost as tall as me. If I looked really closely at it I could see bugs like ants, aphids, and ladybugs crawling on it. Sometimes they got stuck and I could see their little bodies curled up on the weed stem. The weed would always be very thorny, and my mom would have to struggle with it to pull it. On one side of the house there was a flower bush, with white flowers in clumps that looked like snowballs. In the spring we would pull off the flower clumps and throw them at each other, so we could have snowball fights in spring. We also found the ash trap door on the outside of the chimney and played in that. We dug a small hole by the gate to put stuff in, like a piece of broken glass, and random sticks. There was also a broken down wooden swingset that didn’t have the swings attached, so we used it as a sort of treehouse. Since there were three large trees in the backyard, we always had a huge pile of leaves to jump in in the fall. We would then stuff the leaves into bags designed to look like a scarecrow for Halloween. Some of the bricks were loose on the edge of the porch, so one year on April fools one of my little brothers and I took them and scattered them around the yard to try and convince my other brother that all the birds had turned into bricks.