Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.
This hit me hard with nostalgia. I grew up in a neighborhood full of kids around my age, and we had a decent number of trees and forest between each house. There were so many pathways in the woods between homes, and we would build forts and hide and go seek in those woods around the houses. Truly beautiful memories.