Prewrite+2

The history of my backyard goes like this, a dog, which is like the past, and several children, who are like the future, left my place to go to their place. They leave behind assorted bits of their past, leaving us to find uses for them. For the first few days we would stumble across them, and put them in our own box of past. We found most of them in the garden. There garden was full of mint, which I would pick to make homegrown tea. Delicious. The garden also had bluebells, and the occasional tulip. I remember walking through it, the path stones cool and scratchy on my feet. The little pebbles by the path had small green and blue stones, and occasionally a pink one. The path went directly under the dining room window, then stopped directly above a bed of rocks at a height of the width of three railroad ties. I would often jump down from the path onto the rocks barefoot, which stung and made the rocks grind together. Why did I do this? I have no idea. There were some bags of woodchips next to the side of the house, and I crawled on top of them and chalked some random bricks blue on the side of the house. They are still colored blue, because they didn't wash off before we left. Why did I color them blue? I'm lucky I didn't have to clean the side of the house. There was a maple tree next to the rocks, and it was good for climbing. Wrapped around a branch is a piece of rope so old the tree grew around it. It was impossible to remove the rope from the branch. There was also an old nail in another branch that we used to hang things on. Old. Grey. Next to the maple was a tall cottonwood tree that smelled of decay and had to be cut down. Devastating. I would sit in the summer and watch the seeds float away through a tissue paper sky. Why did the tree have to be cut down? In the fall the leaves from the trees made a huge pile of leaves that took all five of us to rake up. There were berry bushes along the back fence. What kind of bushes were they? I never found out. In one corner the bushes were very thick and I would crawl under them like they were a fort. We moved out of that house in eighth grade, and I never saw the backyard again. We moved into that house in second grade. Some flowers occasionally grew in the grass by the porch. Why did they grow there? They were small and pretty, and we had to take care to not step on them in the spring. In the spring it was very lush and colorful, but in the winter it was very bare. One year I made a snowman in the shadow of the fence that lasted long after the rest of the snow had melted. There was a flower bush on the other side of the house that grew white flowers in clumps that looked like snowballs. They wilted quickly, so while they bloomed we would pick the largest bunches and throw them at each other like snowballs in spring.