My Special Place

Abstract

Essay: My Special Place 208 My Special Place Theresa Wong Spectrum Community School Victoria, British Columbia Citation: Wong, Theresa (2013). “My Special Place.” Children, Youth and Environments 23(2): 208-210. Retrieved [date] from http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=chilyoutenvi. It’s funny, how sometimes we don’t realize just how special something is until it’s long gone. Strawberry Vale was my elementary school and arguably the best six years of my life. It was innocence and blissful ignorance in a bubble. Natural shaping of the grounds provided the absolute perfect playground for any child with an active imagination. Rough but round boulders and mounds of rock jutted out of the earth, forming nooks and crannies perfect for anything from “jumping rocks” to fairies’ homes. Along with these heaps of rock came oak trees, soft carpets of moss and wildflowers; bleeding hearts and tiger lilies and bluebells. I suppose many of those “flowers” were really weeds but anything with petals and pretty colors was a flower to me. A particularly simple pastime involved a series of large round boulders arranged around the outside of a small outcrop of larger rocks. I can still feel the rough, yet somehow soft surface of the jumping rocks; scratchy, but not harsh enough to scrape your skin, unless of course, you leapt too far or too short and lost your footing. See, the fun was in jumping from rock to rock, leaping over stretches of “hot lava” and then hugging the boulder as you touched down on it. I remember there being one particularly tricky boulder, steeper than the rest, but our feet had long grown used to the precarious slope and we never fell. There was a wonderful native garden at Strawberry Vale. In the spring and summer it was a delightful sight to behold, blooming with purple-y pink wild roses (that didn’t taste very good by the way) and Oregon grape. Hidden in this little strip of native plants was a whole other world, like some kind of fairy land grown from the pages of a storybook. The image of that garden in my head is always basked in sunshine, though really, the clouds rained more than the sun ever shone. The many bushes were cut in a way that left the insides quite hollow, forming little scoops that could be turned into “houses” and decorated with daisy chains. Whenever I’m lucky enough to go back to the native garden, I always make sure to take a peek in each bush dwelling, visit the climbing tree and walk by the stream. (Which isn’t a real stream, but merely a ribbon of water that flows from the drains; we all called it a stream anyways though, because it sounded so much nicer then “water flowing from the drain pipe”—see Figure 1.) Essay: My Special Place 209 Figure 1. Children playing in the stream that flows beside the native forest planted by students, teachers and volunteers at Strawberry Vale School Photo: Sylvia Samborski I remember a rather dreary day—the clouds were a stormy grey and relentlessly pelted the earth with freezing splatters—no, drenching bucketfuls—of rain. I huddled quietly with a friend under a canopy of drooping branches. It leaked though, and spatters of icy chill ran up and down my arms with every rain drop that struck down. The only dry spot to sit was under the branches that grew the closest together, and these extended out over a grey boulder. To get up to the dry spot, you had to plant both feet firmly on the rock and then pull yourself up with the aid of a spiky branch. The roof of branches grew so close over the top of the boulder that you had to hunch your back and duck your head to avoid being punctured by the fine tips of the pine needles above. The rough, sand papery texture of the large rock scraped the palms of my hands and grazed my legs through the fabric of my pants as I half sat, half crouched on the large rock. A freezing cool emanated from the hunk of stone, leaving me...