PRESENT: I want to go back to when I looked at life when I was eight.

I crossed out number one on my Wichita Bucket List today with a hike through the Great Plains Nature Center.

Though I could have done without the cement walkways, it was a bring-me-back-up-north kind of experience. Once I left the white brick road and took to the dirt paths into the woods where I could no longer hear the traffic from I-96, I left Kansas and was back in Wisconsin where the trees are plenty and the water is always moving, never still. I was the only person that existed.

That feeling of “I’m home” only lasted for a moment when a group of kids came barreling down the path: Two boys, dirt up to their knees as if they had on brown socks, came at each other with swords made from snapped off maple branches. A girl trailed behind them yelling, “I’m gonna tell” over and over again.

They made me remember all the time I spent in the woods behind my house climbing the sumacs, digging up the clay in the crick and spreading it over my face like war paint, and, of course bending over the pipe that jutted out of the hillside and drinking the water that flowed out of it. Felt good to feel like nothing else matter but that moment when the woods seemed like magic. . . . I stared at the line of painted turtles sunning themselves on the log in the pond as though I had never seen one before.

I want to go back there.