I went to the park today. The woods there remind me so much of where I used to live. Before my family moved to the city, we lived on a farm outside of town. It was about sixty acres, evenly split between woods and grassland. We'd moved there from Dallas nine years ago, when I was eight. I spent the next eight years of my life there. And then we moved.

I will never forget that place. Not long after we moved to the farm, we put in a two acre pond. It fit perfectly to the contours of the land. It looked stunning. Wildlife loved the place. We'd get blue, white, and gray herons, mallards, Canadian geese, wild ducks, a pair of beavers, and of course plenty of fish and turtles. I'd go and sit by the waterside in the humid, summer evenings, waiting for the sun to set, and going in only when it got so dark out that I was afraid my mom would worry. At times I wrote, but mostly I just sat and thought.

We had this old oak by the pond. It was so big that it would have taken three people's outstretched arms to span its girth. It had knots the size of your fist, and its branches were twice as thick as a man's torso. I remember climbing that tree once and straddling one of its upper limbs with my legs. It felt so strong, so immovable, as if it had been there since the beginning of time and would remain there until the end. There was a sense of peace in clinging to it and watching the world pass below. You could hear the cries of the cicadas in its upper branches, and in the pines that surrounded it. That sound still brings peace to me, like nothing else will.

But we moved off the farm in March and left behind the pond and the old oak and the cicadas. I can't look out the back window anymore and see a gray heron flapping away or watch a dragonfly pump blood into its wings and take its first flight. There aren't any trees for me to climb. Still, I think that part of me's sitting in that old tree, still clinging to its strength, and still listening to the sound of the heat. I never wanted to leave, and in some ways, I think I never will.

I sat down on a park bench to cool down and rest. I was running hard, and the day was humid and hot. I took a drink from my water bottle and tried to slow down my racing heart. And then I heard it. In the tree above me, singing as loud and clear as ever, were my cicadas. I took a long, deep breath, and a sense of peace came over me. "The cicadas are singing," I thought to myself. "Everything's going to be all right, after all."