The summer after my senior year of high school, I was walking through this little festival we have in my hometown that commemorates the Fourth of July called the Freedom Festival. It has, among other things, fair food, local vendors selling trinkets (a word that is rarely used properly, but I swear to you, come to the Freedom Festival and you’ll see), live music, and my favorite attraction: the Free Tent. Now really, the Free Tent is called the Business Tent, but because of the amount of free crap that is handed to you while walking through the tent, everyone that I know calls it the Free Tent. During my walk through the Free Tent, I spotted the Fishers Parks and Recreation setup. Well actually, first I saw their free candy and sunglasses, but then I noticed their display. While my friends were casually sneaking four or five pairs of sunglasses into their bags, all I could see was a diagram that boasted a renovation of Holland Park. I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering the town had also recently started a big, ugly building project right in front of our quaint little town hall, but I was. They were adding fountains and better sidewalks, a splash park, and replacing the oldest park equipment with what looked like skyscraper-height park equipment in a sickly green tinge. As we continued through the Free Tent with our arms full of plastic cups, pens, and candy, I couldn’t get that computer-generated image of a new Holland Park out of my mind.

I have lived in Fishers, Indiana for as long as I can remember, less than a mile away from Roy G. Holland Memorial Park. As a kid, I spent long afternoons chasing my friends through the park equipment, ducking under bridges, burning my skin on hot metal slides, and giggling at the expletives that were hastily scrawled inside of the long plastic tubes. I perfected my monkey bar dismount, attempted in vain to get my swing to go all the way around, and once it got dark enough, chased lightning bugs through the woods. Holland Park WAS my childhood. It was just far enough away from my house that it took a while for my parents to warm up to the idea that I could walk there without their supervision, and once I passed that stage, it symbolized freedom. I would hook my dog up to the leash and bound out the door, and do a few laps around the park with my baby sister in tow. When I entered my teenage years, it became my escape, spending long hours walking around the park talking to my friends about who knows what until the sun set. The night before I left my hometown for college, my best friend and I did about four laps around Holland Park, which had become routine for us every time we saw each other, and pretended like the inevitable wasn’t going to happen as we walked the same loop around the park that had dominated my childhood.

I was gone for about a month and a half before coming home again (besides one trip home that had been kind of a mistake), and by then, the park construction was underway. They had ripped out my beloved swing-set, bulldozed all the equipment where I had identified my first swear words, and erased the memory of the Holland Park that I had grown up with. A few weeks later I returned home again to find that they had put in some of the new equipment, which was greener and larger than I remembered in the picture. My stomach seemed to twist in an odd way as I passed by it, and every time I drove by the park that weekend I tried not to look at it.

I am only in my second month of college, but I now know that once you leave home, it doesn’t feel like home anymore. You sleep in the bed you’ve had since you got out of the crib, secretly longing for the mattress you have at school which is made for actual adult-sized people. You forget that people actually care about your whereabouts and yell at your parents when they ask you where you’re going. Your roommate becomes you family, your dorm room becomes your house, and campus feels more like home than home does. Coming home feels like putting on an old pair of ill-fitting pants, and you realize you’re not a size 2 anymore. Or coming back to your childhood park that has been “improved” but is really just trying to be like Carmel.

I am scheduled to go back home this weekend for my fall break. I’m not sure if I’ll walk around the park this time, but I know I’ll drive past it and roll my eyes at the poor color scheme, and the fact that the height of the equipment makes it seem almost un-climbable. Eventually, I’ll probably forget what the old park looked like. In my lifetime, they will probably do a new renovation, but I may not be living in Fishers long enough to see that. Who knows what will happen to that park, but it will never stop holding my childhood, no matter how much it changes. And I guess the same can be said for my hometown. No matter where I go, and no matter how many things they change about Fishers to make it bigger and probably uglier, it will never stop being the place where I grew up, and ultimately, home.