I never go out looking for it. It always starts with something else - an errand, a visit with a friend, something commonplace. It's on the way home that suddenly I get the urge to turn here, or take that exit instead of this one, or drive right by my street and go off somewhere else. Trying to get lost... trying to find something.

I wasn't at all sure, yesterday, that I could identify the house, but when I first caught sight of it I wondered how I could forget. I pulled over to the opposite side of the street and stared and stared. As the memories came back, I started to see them: the children. They ran up the hill in the front yard and rolled down it again and again until their knees were green with grass stain... while riding a tricycle along the cracked sidewalk, the little boy got a nosebleed and the little girl stared fascinated at the bright red drops appearing on his shirt... holding hands, they huddle beneath the same umbrella, walking clumsily in rubber boots. I begin to rebuild the floor plan in my head, and I see them playing Memory on the Persian rug or eating alphabet soup at the kitchen table. Bushes block my view, and I can't tell if the clubhouse still stands in the backyard - I can't imagine, a decade and a half later, that it does, but I tell myself that perhaps it does.

Sometimes it makes me feel angry. I drove around one afternoon in search of my childhood playgrounds, and found that the merry-go-rounds and jungle gyms had been replaced by safer, dull plastic play units. I stopped by my old school tonight on the way home, feeling eerie in the empty parking lot, to look at the construction my mother had told me about. Staring up at the new silhouette, I felt cheated. How dare they mess with my nostalgia?

I keep feeling like I'm going to get caught, too. Someone will pull up behind my car and a uniformed figure will lean on the edge of my window. "What's this all about, miss?" I'll stammer back a reply, trying to justify my invasion of a world where I've ceased to live. "I used to feed ducks here," I desperately tell my invisible accusers by the yacht club gates. "The last people who lived here..." I begin, or plead, "This is my school!" You're too old now, the stern voices in my head tell me. That's in the past. I shake my head, alone in the parking lot with the moonlight. This is still my school, my playground, my life, I say... I almost feel that sixteen is a place, that I can visit five-and-a-half, that the right map could lead me back to ten. Why do the streets look different this time around?