My feet crossing the threshold of my grandparents’ farmhouse, the kitchen greets me with its cornflower blue cabinets and expansive bookshelves housing worn cookbooks. Through roll-open windows, a bird feeder bustles with chirping woodpeckers and finches while the Hammer Creek sparkles like dirty glass in the afternoon sunlight. Squealing as the seeker counts to sixty, my siblings, cousins, and I race to the attic to hunch behind boxes, the dust triggering the tickle of a sneeze, or to the upstairs bedrooms to squash our diaphragms flat under the bed frames. We wait for the trill of “Apple, peaches, pumpkin pie, who’s not ready, holler I!” to start the game. Our antics arouse mild amusement from our patient grandparents until we become too rowdy for their tastes, whence they banish us outside to romp with the farm dogs.

Outdoors, a generations-old swing set with A-frames perfect for the gymnastic feat of skin the cat squats beside the house. Beyond it, a turnstile gate, rusted and green, leads to the rippling Hammer Creek with its bouncy, hand-built wooden suspension bridge. In summertime, we spend lazy afternoons catching crayfish, yelping and shrieking as the water shocks us with icy fingers that cling to our goosebumped flesh. Occasionally, our wanderlust drives us beyond our grandparents’ property to discover deeper swimming pools, mucilaginous mud mires, and unscoured crayfish beds.

Atop a hill belonging solely to itself, the gray, weathered 19th century stone barn with walls that have slowly bent like cheese curls from age houses pigeons whose flight sounds like popping popcorn as they burst from its dark, mysterious depths. Within the behemoth’s mountains of corn fodder and alfalfa bales, my siblings, cousins, and I once built a grand hay fortress. We spent hours slithering through the narrow tunnels we had constructed and ingesting gritty hay chaff tasting of late summer. When we deserted our den due to dusty discomfort with straw-laden hair, soiled clothing, and scratched knees, our grandparents exclaimed in dismay at our ruffled state. Grandma ordered, “Set not a foot in the house before you wash off!” and lovingly helped us clean our scrapes with warm, sudsy water.

The warm, delectable smell of freshly baked coffee cake in the kitchen, wooden swings with peeling white paint, the Hammer Creek’s crayfish and seaweed, and dusty barn all greet me like a much-anticipated handwritten letter from a friend when I visit Buch Mill Road, Lititz, Pennsylvania over the holidays. Sparkling Waters Farm is my home, a welcoming, familiar, safe place of loving family and wonderful memories.