“This will happen so fast that one night he will be in the backyard, believing it a perfect place, and by the next night he will have changed and the yard as he imagined it will be gone, and this era of his life will be behind him forever.”

This famous piece by Susan Orlean is one of those stories where it’s hard to pick just one great sentence. You find one, and then another, and then another — a rabbit hole of great sentences. But this one resonates because it captures something universal about our childhoods, and that moment when we start to leave it behind. We are so caught up in the rush to grow up, we don’t even notice that something is gone. It’s not until years later, when we revisit a childhood home and the yard is so much smaller than the wild place of adventure that our 10-year-old minds dreamed it to be, that we feel the pang of loss. (Oh, read the wonderful annotation of the story here.)