Week 6 - Wordsworth and familiar places

Wordsworth’s walks around Tintern Abbey are enlightened by time and repetition. He had visited so often that walking around the abbey led him to recall, and reflect, on the ways that time has changed him. He writes in “Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey” that as a young man he came through those hills “like a roe,” bounding, running like he had something to be running from.

My Tintern Abbey is called Dogwood Park, and it’s a playground in my hometown with a little loop through a small forest. In addition to the main playground, little miniature play areas are spotted around the loop, each themed after nature: one has a rope jungle gym themed after a spiderweb, another has a spinning contraption resembling a cocoon, another has a dragonfly see-saw. I visited a hundred times when I was young (actually young, perhaps younger than Wordsworth had in mind when he saw himself “bounding” like a deer), and when I walk through that loop now, I can recall a hundred different memories with each individual part of the playground - conversations had on each playground contraption, the tree we tried to climb in until I found a wasps’ nest, the field I tried to run in, the walk I tried to skateboard on. But what I remember most of all is my longest friendship - with a girl who lived in the house by the park. I’ve known her since I was small, and every time I visited as a child we would walk the loop and find there something new.

The colorful metal creations of Dogwood Park might not be quite the nature Wordsworth loved at Tintern Abbey, although the woods at the end of the loop is lovely, but a walk around it inspires similar feelings. Wordsworth's poem determines that he’s changed since he was young, but the change only enriches his appreciation of the time that he has had with his sister, and the time he had with that space. Like Wordsworth, I find that when I visit Dogwood Park, my friendship with Kairavi, the park I’ve visited so repeatedly, and all the ways I’ve changed over the years all become mixed together - I can’t think about one without the other. My relationship with the walk itself and the setting of the walk are inextricable from my relationship with the person I spent time with there, and the person I’ve become since.

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