When I was young, I was quite a tom boy. Or rather, I have quite an interesting childhood experience that not many of the urbanising kids of my age gets to enjoy. I played catching, police & thief & all sorts of boyish role-playing games with my cousins that involved climbing of trees & slopes, hiking, exploring forests on bikes with our dogs taking the lead etc. Those days at my ahma’s kampung house was really filled with lotsa memories. We had a big compound for us to play, hills, slopes, carpentry workshop, mango, rambutan, coconut plantation, my ahma’s garden, even the backdoor from the bathroom area opens up to a very interesting landscape! Abandoned houses or vehicles nearby became our private sanctury cum secret headquarter, with loads of raw material to utilize for our next adventure. There’s this dried out river 200m away with little crabs & insects to play with. It’s also during one of those ‘rough’ days when I caught skin allergy & ever since I’m prone to rashes. Sometimes, my dad will join us on our expeditions & will tell us more about the place, how different it was from last time, & his own adventures when he was a boy. On milder days, of course we have the usual cycling, hopscotch, zero point, badminton & catching on our sunny sandy porch. It’s strange how I never got tanned.. Most interesting was on mid-autumn festivals, when we were allowed to play later into the night, & we like to carry those paper lanterns, form a ghost busting team & walk around scaring ourselves, since theres no street lamps at all, its pretty scary! We only return to change our burnt-out candles where my un-game sis will be stationed there for duty. Not forgetting some impromptu trips to changi beach, where we flew kites or played in the water in our tees & shorts, then go home dripping wet! We will also make spontaneous trips to ubin when my dad feels like it when we are around changi point. My aunts & uncles will always order chendol & ice kacang if we are making a trip to changi beach..afterall we are just 5mins drive away. Thinking back, i sometimes wonder do these memories belong to me or isit a story I’ve heard? Seemed so distant, unfamiliar.. Can never never ever do these again.. Everything’s changing…. Except memories. 
