The Kingdom

What used to be a fond vacation memory is now a peaceful place I see every day. What was once a place where I could meet total strangers and make friends is now a regular hang-out spot after school. What was formerly the location of an occasional family sport outing is now a routine weekend exercise. This is a place where I can go when I'm feeling lonely and sad, and it’s a place where I go when I'm happy and can reminisce about old times. This place has held special ties to my life as a child and teenager and those experiences helped shape who I am today. Not only do these descriptions portray what this place- the mellow, tranquil, comforting, Leghorn Park- is about, but they embody what it truly is.

In the summer of 2006 at the age of 11, I had first come across this peaceful park, of this peaceful town, by my peaceful, caring, and loving aunt. My family had traveled to this town from Chicago and stayed under the roof of my aunt for a month while visiting her as well as other relatives. The third day here my siblings and I yearned to find a park we could play at and explore the wonders of this new area. Throughout an entire day of visiting, park after park, we came across one that was the closest to home, which oddly enough was the last one we went to. It was perfect.

This park, peculiarly named Leghorn Park, was one of the nicest and cleanest parks I had ever been to. The feeling that rushed through my body when I first saw it came over me like the morning sun as it pervades the skies with radiant light in the morning and it was the only feeling that could express my thoughts: happiness. Just the sight of the place was enough to keep my energy going all day long. It had numerous structures, each of them more unique than the other. The first was of a smaller build with a few platforms and small slides which resembled a ship because of the many flags and lower deck with nets for sleeping; the emergency sailboat complete with plastic square sails and a propeller to help maneuver it was right next to it off the port bow. The second structure was the tallest of them all and would have taken about three of me, at that time, stacked atop one another to stand as tall as it; four brightly colored slides exiting the opposite sides of the tower made the whole structure look as if it were a giant squid-with staggering tallness, a pointing head, and slithering tentacles-which delighted my overactive imagination. The last of the three main structures was by far the most fun to play in and the most detailed, complex, and well thought; therefore, I gave it a most prestigious name: the kingdom.

The kingdom could have been seen as the most boring feature in the park: it required the most of my endless imagination in order to make use of the bountiful inventive things it had to offer: it had a castle with three foot high outer stone walls that surrounded the entire land with the exception of the front gate, and a fourteen plank wide drawbridge nailed to the ground yet it was not immobile thanks to the equally stationary handle inside the castle, and a four foot high climb by rope to reach the watch tower, and a six by six courtyard in need of renovating due to the vast sea of mulch and dirt that engulfed the ground, and stables in the back country with livestock and horses for traversing the twenty square feet kingdom, and a secret exit route in the back in which escape was only possible by going down the perilous nine foot slide while going speeds up to half a mile and hour, and alarms in four corners of the castle linking to the alarms set across the whole kingdom, and it even had a dungeon: one small, confined, and compacted two foot by two foot cell with one window not even a foot wide or tall with three bars lining it and an entrance only about a size bigger than the window where only a needle stream of light could pervade deep in the bowels of the castle. It had everything a real castle would have, and its fun would never cease: the perfect fortress for a child.

As a child this place provided wonder and enjoyment, possibly the most of it while at my month vacation in California; it was a land of friendly people, of great weather, of boundless fun. As a teenager, a few years later, this memorable spot has still been the location of many outings with friends and family. While looking back on it now I can remember all the specific details about the place that had me love it in the first place, such as the fresh air, when breathed in gave me a sense of nostalgia as if I was running around through the same park and fields years ago. Hearing the noises from all the children took me back to a time where everything was worry-free, and the same things that I used to say when I was little, while playing at the park with friends, are still the same exact words used today which was a blissful moment. One of the best things I have ever had, in the shopping center next to the park, is the ambrosial frozen yogurt. The shop that sold this yogurt has almost every topping you can think of from vivid rainbow sprinkles to crunchy sweet Nerds candy and many chocolate toppings such as Oreos, Reese's, and Hershey’s. That frozen yogurt has saved me from enduring a grueling scorching summer day in the park many times with its cooling, tempering, silky-smooth texture and flavor. This park has instilled a new feeling of home in me I have never felt before; it has and always will be a place of nostalgic ecstasy that will stay with me as I grow and continue to experience life to its fullest.

Nick C.