Growing up in a small town is incredibly boring. They try to warn you in books and movies, but unless you experience it firsthand, it’s a little hard to believe. I learned the hard way when I moved from West Palm Beach to Sebring. It was a couple hours north, but much safer than West Palm by a longshot, which had considerable appeal to my parents at the time.

After living there for a few years and staying relatively bored and isolated due to living in a neighborhood full of old people- my grandma included- we moved. It was only a few blocks away, to a house near the YMCA, but it made all the difference, because one of my -at the time- acquaintances lived right across the street. We’d ridden the same school bus, and he’d insisted on talking to me and becoming friends. When I found out where we would be moving to, I tried to be as covert as possible in finding out which house was his. It didn’t matter, because he figured it out when we moved in, but I thought I was so clever for trying to be sneaky.

With Lane came Casey, a girl our age who also rode our bus. We bonded over being mean to him, because we were teenagers and it seemed like the thing to do at the time, but eventually we all became best friends. We started spending as much time together as we humanly could. If one of us had a bad day, we would get together and, because there was nothing else to do in a small Florida town, go to the Circle K down the street to get the largest sized Polar Pop we could before vanishing into the woods to take a walk. We stayed out for hours, and annoyed our parents to no end, but it was fine. It was worth it. We didn’t get into the stereotypical teenage mischief, so our parents trusted us to go on our little walks. They didn’t know where we went. They never asked, and we never told.

We ended up finding the hideout by accident, exploring paths that were already overgrown and muddy until we came to a little clearing, the ground covered in pine needles. It was the coolest spot ever. Private, quiet, isolated: the perfect spot to sit and talk and drink our sugary beverages when it was too hot to actually walk. Getting to it was a bit of a task, but we had two routes we could take. One we used more than the other, which I personally enjoyed because it made Lane do an incredible balancing act over a muddy puddle in order to avoid getting his shoes dirty. We were best friends, but teasing him was still fun. Still is.

That path is now dried up, in large part thanks to global warming. The overgrown paths we walked and managed to turn into walkways with our boots and sneakers have turned back into overgrown paths that make you worry about snakes lurking in them again. Getting to the hideout all these years later is more of a struggle than ever, especially going alone, but it’s doable if you know where to turn. What tree branch to duck under, which conjoined trees to slip between. If you hit the state park boundary, you’ve gone too far.

The initials we carved into the one big tree have faded, grown over because we were too worried about the tree to carve them deeply at the time. The stuffed animal we left out there as a mascot was still there, hidden beneath more pine needles. It vibrated once, and we thought it was hilarious, but the batteries have long since died. The already matted fur has degraded in the three years since it got left there, going from a vibrant maroon to a grayish pink. The facial features of the lion weren’t spared from the passage of time either, going from a lovable valentine’s day gift to something out of a horror movie.

Somehow, despite the changes, the hideout in general looked almost the exact same. Emptier from going back alone, but the same. Pine needles don’t change as much as people do, it seems.