Fields and Open Lots

I spotted boys playing sandlot baseball in a vacant lot sprawling grandly through a residential district. There was no “no trespassing” fence around it—what a nostalgic sight. Wild grasses grew fairly thick, and it seemed the lot had been in this state for at least several months.

I was musing on how sloppily this piece of land was being managed. But in that very instant, it struck me with a start that I myself had been infected by the flow of the times.

When I was little, in the “fields and open lots” scattered here and there, there was no notion of “someone else’s land”—we simply took them for our own free playgrounds. Nowadays, though, the moment a vacant lot appears it is ringed with a high wall, and in no time a house is built. It is an unavoidable state of affairs, but for me, who was allowed to learn so much on other people’s land, the sloppy management of this lot came to feel like something wonderful.