There’s a corner on my street that doubles as a time warp.

The other day, my son and I were heading out to run a quick errand. Nothing special, just one of those routine afternoons where the air is thick with humidity and the faint smell of cut grass clings to the breeze. As we turned the corner, I caught a glimpse of something that made me do a double-take: about twenty kids, lined up across the sidewalk, glasses of lemonade in hand, hunched over chalk drawings that turned the concrete into a kaleidoscope of color. They were talking, laughing, shouting to each other across hopscotch grids and swirling hearts.

Not a screen in sight.

It was like stumbling into a memory I didn’t know I still carried.

Of course, my son thought I was being sentimental about his childhood, those endless summer nights when he and his siblings ruled the neighborhood like barefoot royalty. Okay, sure, I did go there for a second. I could almost see them again, sprinting past our driveway with popsicle-stained mouths and tangled hair, playing street hockey, tag, or kickball until the streetlights flickered on.

But this memory went even further back.

It pulled me into a long-lost corner of my childhood, one filled with echoes, when we played games like kick the can and freeze tag. Every night after dinner, a large group of us would gather on our driveway. We’d divide it into two four-square courts and play until dusk. There were twenty to thirty of us, all dressed in black hoodies and shorts. We looked like a gang, a suburban band of hooligans with nowhere to go and too much to do. We played round after round of four-square war, rotating players every time the ball went out of bounds, arguing over the made-up rules. We were waiting for that magic hour when the sun disappeared behind the big dirt hill at the edge of our subdivision.

There were always two captains. The teams were never the same, and not because we planned it that way. It just happened. No tears, no exclusions. Everybody was welcome. Everybody had a spot on a team. We hid, ran, and played until our legs were scratched and mosquito-bitten.

Back then, our neighborhood was known for its open backyard policy. The neighbors had agreed not to put up fences so we could access each other’s swing sets or organize our own World Series games on the world’s largest baseball diamond. Some yards had clotheslines, and there was always that one neighbor who forgot to take theirs down. I walked around for three summers looking like a nearly headless disaster magnet. No one else had that problem, just me. Every time. But that didn’t stop me. I’d run into the line, feet flying up like a cartoon character, then land -splat – flat on my back with the wind knocked out of me. For a split second, crawling around on all fours, moaning and trying to breathe, I felt like I was dying. Then it passed. After everyone finished laughing at me, we picked up right where we left off. We could have played all night.

Streetlights and laps around the block on bikes with banana seats measured time. The biggest drama of the day was where the out-of-bounds line was or who drank all the lemonade. No phones. No instant gratification. Just games with rules made up on the spot, arguments settled with rock-paper-scissors, and a universal agreement that no one went home until the lightning bugs went out.

I’m not going to pretend it was all perfect. Nostalgia has a funny way of putting soft focus on the hard stuff. But there was a kind of freedom in that time that I still crave. That version of summer felt endless, not in the slow, dragging way, but in the way that made you believe there’d always be another night to play. Another pitcher of lemonade. Another chance to hit the game-winning home run.

That moment at the corner reminded me that maybe those kinds of summers aren’t gone, just reimagined. They still live on in flashes, when a group of kids decides that a sidewalk is a canvas and a few sticks of chalk are all they need to make magic.

And maybe-just maybe-that ’s enough to pull us grown-ups out of our to-do lists and carpool schedules. Enough to permit us to remember. To stand still for a minute. To feel the tug of a fever dream we didn’t know we were still dreaming.