I have this really vivid picture in my head — my house in the summer, situated beneath the blue sky. But it's not really a sky blue or a baby blue, it's like an aqua blue, a bright blue. It's slightly darker, slightly realer.

And I see myself there. I'm much younger, probably wearing a costume of sorts—a princess costume, most likely. I'm running around, in and out of the house, onto the swing set, up the slide, and into the playhouse. I have friends come and go, and relatives come to visit.

I had this whole other life. It hardly seems like me.

It's funny when I think about it now. It really does seem like a different person — a child I'm babysitting, perhaps. As I sit in my kitchen — the very same kitchen of which I slammed the door on my way outside to play —I realize I am completely different. I feel old, to tell the truth and a bit disrupted. I'm not that young girl anymore, and she is not me. I'm her protector. I hold her memories, her dreams, and her happiness, but we are no longer one in the same.

It's days like this—I'm home for a break from school—that I remember this little girl well. I feel trapped as I sit in my childhood kitchen, looking out over the snow on a cloudy day. She never felt that way, I am certain. She had the world open to her, or so it seemed from her backyard.

I have beautiful memories of my childhood, not because everything was perfect then, but because of how things have changed now. I am no longer carefree. The world is much bigger than the childhood yard I once played in. The world is much scarier, it's never as sunny, and the sky is not blue.

My memories, I've found, have changed with time, but I think those of my childhood summers may have solidified. I now understand them fully. I was carefree and I was sheltered. I had nothing better or worse to do than run around my house, riding imaginary horses and defeating imaginary dragons. I made a garden once and I was the queen. I pretended my house was a castle.

I was young and I didn't know much about the world. But now I do, and so I can appreciate the memories for what they were.

Childhood summers were not a time to figure things out. They were a time to be oblivious, and to unconsciously accept reality. They were a time to enjoy the world, and appreciate the simplicity of nature, friendship, and family, before reality set in and changed all of that.

I guess I'd encourage everyone to look for themselves in their memories. Try to see those kids playing around outside even if it calls for a bit of exaggeration. It's important to still be able to picture it, even though it only exists in your mind.

It's important to understand how you once were— innocent and carefree and joyous. It's important to recognize that past you is still in there somewhere, you need only look a little harder.

Those children we were, are still us, in many ways. They're just buried beneath a lot of information and people and time and trouble and love and loss.

We too often forget about simplicity. We forget about the time before our minds were full and disrupted.