Melissa Morewitz- Experience of a Natural Setting #2

My second natural experience took place at the beach, a small beach near my parents house. I remember growing up and going down to the river to this very beach and it was so simple. There were the remains of a broken dock which covered a cement tunnel running under it but this had been there for so long that there were little streams running through the cement and us kids treated it as just an obstacle we had to climb to reach the rest of the beach that lied on the other side of it. There were huge rocks which we had to climb down to get to the small secluded beach and and there was a wooded area that started where the beach stopped. Now when I went back, the broken dock and cement tunnel were gone. There was a big nice deck to walk over instead of climbing down the rocks. Houses were built where the wooded area once was. This nothingness little beach had been where I ran to as a child when I would get mad at my parents, where I played in the summer with friends and where I took my dog to play fetch. There was no danger anymore, no danger that I would cut myself on the rock or fall off the cement tunnel or get a splinter from the broken dock. The woods weren't a dark place we wandered in anymore, they had houses in them now. Although this beach is now a much nicer, family friendly neighborhood beach now, it feels different than it did when I was younger. As I sat on the new deck over the beach I realized that nature changes as humans change. Nature is rarely the exact same as the last time you saw it and although all these repairs had been done, I could still feel the relaxing sound of the water, the birds and the wind that I felt when I was younger when I closed my eyes.