Of all the things I am thankful for, I must include that safe space of my teenage years in Kansas City, a small woods hidden less than a mile from my home. We had lived on Belvedere Parkway over a year before I found them, and I wouldn’t have found them at all if it hadn’t been for the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed. My mom had eventually handed her album down to me along with her old record player from when we were in California, and I listened to music in my room for hours – like any teenager.

“Something calls to me.

“The trees are drawing me near.

“I’ve got to find out why.

“Those gentle voices I hear,

“Explain it all with a sigh.”

I don’t know why those song lines always move me when I hear them, but they especially did so when I was a young, imaginable teen who played Dungeons & Dragons and read Tolkien over and over. I liked to imagine that the trees could talk to me, that I could understand what the leaves were whispering. I would go on long walks in the neighborhood at twilight, when the lowering sky and lengthening shadows added an air of mystery to the familiar streets and houses.

On one of those walks, I found a stretch of trees, a small woods, that developers had not yet torn down. There was a small creek that ran in front of it, with a high embankment that stood about three feet above the ground. I would scramble up the dusty embankment, finding footholds in the exposed roots from all the trees reaching toward the scurrying trail of water.

With dirty knees and fingernails, I would sit with an arm draped around a slender tree trunk, my scruffy sneakers dangling over the creek. It felt good to sit there, feeling the rough bark against my arm and torso through my thin t-shirt; listening to the birds chattering above; watching the sunlight dance to and fro across the water through the moving leaves.

The view was not that great. I was facing the houses where I came from, the very thing I was trying to escape. I didn’t want to look back, so I got up and walked deeper into the woods. The trees were spaced far enough apart that it was easy walking. There was no clear path, but I could see where other kids had been here before me. There were even bike tracks. There were dried leaves and pine needles crunching underfoot, and the breeze flowed easily through the trunks and underbrush.

I only walked about ten minutes before reaching the other end of the woods, which abruptly stopped at the edge of an expanse of meadow. One of the trees at the edge had sturdy, low branches, so I swung up into it and settled myself comfortably, leaning back into the trunk and filling my eyes with all those tall grasses and swinging wildflowers. Most of them were tiny purple things, dotted with Queen Anne’s lace and honeysuckle. It was the end of summer, and already a few leaves were starting to turn in the woods, but that sunny meadow looked like winter could never touch it.

I remember closing my eyes and smelling the warm, earthy air. I was still for so long that the squirrels came back out, climbing the tree next to me, and pausing every time I shifted my weight on that uncomfortable hard branch. I listened to every tiny rustle in the leaves and on the ground, every creak in the swaying branches, every call of each crow and sparrow. I felt far away from civilization, far away from modern times. I could imagine an elf peering at me from behind a tree, or a druid gathering stones for a mysterious circle. For those few, wonderful moments, magic was possible. I was a changeling, and my real mother – some magical being – would soon appear and take me to live with her in a far-away land.

I visited those woods often, and even stopped there to say goodbye the night I ran away from home at 17. I was so happy there, in that world where anything was possible, any dream could come true. They are gone now, developers finally built suburban homes over most of them, but I will always be thankful for the time that I was a child of those magical woods.