If someone asks me where the most memorable place in my life is so far, I have to say my front yard when I lived in Pochen. There was three paths that leads out from the front yard. I used walk through the first path to go to the elementary school. It leads out to the most crowded parts of the town. Second path was the path I loved the most. There was this small rusty door that leads out to the second path and when you open it, patches of rice paddy spreads out in front of you. Also our neighbor grew a lots of corn along the side of the door. It was a perfect place to play hide and sick. As a child, I didn't have much toys or watched television because there were everything outside the house. MY sister and I always found somethings that interest us in our front yard.
When spring comes, my grandmother used to take us when she go out to pick some shepherd's purse which is called Naeng-I in Korea. When you walk out to the first path, you can find tons of fresh green herbs alongside the path. The small hillock alongside the path was covered with green herbs. The earth was still hard and cold which was the hint of winter but amazingly small green herbs with fresh smell peaked out from the ground. If you saw hint of green at the beginning of month you'll see the hillock covered in green after few weeks. I remember three of us at the small hillock with the bag full of herbs. The earth is cold but if you peck it with a hoe to dig out herbs, it broke easily. It felt so soft and cool grabbing the soil with bare hands. The Naeng-i smelled so fresh and unique that you can pick a smell even from far away. When we came back with bagful of Naeng-i, grandmother brew some stew with it and we had wonderful dinner together.
Summer was a great time to catch a tadpole and frog. When summer begins, my sister and I used to go out to rice paddy every day to check if there are tadpole yet. After the rice planting, we could see lots of tadpole hiding between rice patches. As soon as we see it, we used to go inside the house to find something that we can catch tad pole. We scooped a water that had little tiny black tadpole just like finding treasure. We spend all day catching tadpole before mom calls us back to eat dinner. We put all the tadpoles we caught inside the huge bucket with the water from rice paddy. The strange thing was that tadpoles started to disappear after few days. The mystery was solved after I spent almost every second in front of that bucket. I noticed that they started to grow legs and when they do, they starts to climb up the bucket to escape. When they make it to the ground, they didn't have any strength to go to the water so they died. After seeing one tad pole dead on the ground with only back legs, I and my sister never caught a tadpole again.
When winter comes, every inch of tree and plant covered with white frosty snow. It was a perfect time to skate on the rice paddy. As whether get colder, water in the rice paddy starts to froze. At the beginning of the month, it is little bit dangerous to skate there since you don' know if water froze to the center. The water is quite shallow, so even if you fall in to water you won't drown in it, but you'll get bad cold. So my friends and I always wait till the end of December to go skate on the rice paddy. We didn't have any skate but it was slippery enough. We spent hours on the rice paddy or throw snow ball in our front yard.
After I turned 13, I moved to other place and there was no front yard. I haven't visited my old house since the day I moved. Almost ten years had passed, and I am afraid that all the things I remember would be gone. I'm sure it changed a lot, and that's the main reason I don't want to visit there. That place was a huge part of my childhood memory. If I see this place all changed and things I remember don't exist anymore, it would break the happy memory of my childhood.
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