some things don't change.

Sometimes I like to play a game with friends where I ask them what they would be doing at that given moment when they were, say, 10 years old. It's particularly fun during the summer, when it's great to think back to those uncomplicated, unobligated days of summer vacation.

So let's play that game now:

It's 7:45 on a mid-June night. I'm 10 years old. Maybe it's a Tuesday, maybe it's a Saturday; it pretty much doesn't matter, because the days were the same. Chances are, Bill and I woke up around 8:00, had breakfast, dawdled a bit and then headed outside. (Having a brother just 3 years younger meant that together we were part of the larger group of neighborhood kids. During the school year, we may have never acknowledged each other in the hallway, but in the summertime we were content to play together.)

We probably met up with Erin Jones, maybe the Weber kids, perhaps the Hugheys (the whole lot of them), maybe Cris Crowder, Erik Stevens and of course my best pal Kirsten Grimm (and her brother Adam). We all lived on the same side of Coventry Way, our houses backing up against woods populated by old, big trees, not much underbrush and a trickly creek that wound around until it ran directly behind the Grimms' and the Stevens'.

The woods was the source of endless imagination: Days would begin with someone proposing, "Let's pretend that ..." and we were off. We'd carved out a whole village back in the woods, cleared spots that served as our "houses" and raked bare-dirt paths between them. My "house" had at its epicenter a rather largish boulder with a divot in the top that I imagined was the candle holder in my dining room table. We imagined that the disintegrated remains of downed trees was our food, we played in the creek, we used rocks and bark for commerce. We were outside all day, save for lunchtime (which, ideally, involved grilled cheese sandwiches and Lipton Noodle Soup, consumed with Al Pell's noontime farm report on WIBC as the soundtrack).

We spent entire days outside, running around, exercising both our bodies and our imaginations. I can't envision a better way to spend long summer days.

The thing is, as I approach 40 next month, I'm still pretty much hard-wired to spend days outside: playing golf, puttering in the garden, reading on the side porch, walking with my boys.

Some things don't change. I imagine my innate need to be outdoors never will.