Fowardly looking back!

As I sit here in my old bedroom I feel compelled to remember the days when I once lived in this house on the corner of 1850 and 700. I wish now that the streets had better names like Orange Grow and Bimbow but there is no sense in complaining about it. I remember Christmases where I'd run down stairs at 5 in the morning only to be yelled at to go back to bed. I remember being wide-eyed and restless, hoping that Santa had brought me something extra special that year. It was always amazing to run downstairs, after I was allowed to leave my bedroom, and find that nothing had been wrapped and everything had been nicely set into three different piles. I always assumed that Santa was in a hurry and had many more houses to visit so he didn't have time to wrap our presents. Somehow, we always knew which pile was which, even though a stocking exchange had to take place because Santa had put the wrong stocking in the wrong pile. I remember summer time and playing outside for all hours of the day. My dad would never let me, as I put it, get wet until all of the snow was melted off of the mountain. I think it was his way of keeping the sprinkler heads available for a few more weeks. They always seemed to turn up missing after it was time to play in the water. We'd fasten a hose tightly to the water pipe, fasten on a sprinkler head, one that shot a thousand strands of water everywhere, to the end of the hose, and put it under the trampoline. We'd spend hours jumping back and forth over and through the water stream that came through the holes in the tramp. I don't know how the sprinkler heads ever got lost. They seemed to always be in the same spot we left them after we were done. I remember imagining that I was a power ranger and that God had sent me on an errand to save the world from evil. My friend and I would pretend that we had to save the planet from the evil clutches of Rita and Lord Zed and that it was God who had told us to do so. She was always the Pink ranger and I was the Red one. I remember playing in the sand box as a little kid and having a giant yellow tractor. It was my favorite toy and many memories grew with that tractor. The day the neighborhood cat's started using our sandbox for their own VIP bathroom was the day my parents outlawed the box. It was also the day the giant yellow tractor went into a box of its own and the only thing it grew was rust. As I move forward with the next step in my life and prepare to have more added onto my family I look back in awe. I look back and wonder how a kid who used to think that he'd one day grow up to be a cheetah or panther could be in such an amazing position.

-Jeremy-