The Brook, the Backyard, and the Bedroom

I don’t remember whose backyard it was.

I remember the tree… one of those coast live oaks that spreads itself wide and low like it has nowhere else to be. The kind that makes its own weather underneath. I was maybe seven years old, standing at the edge of a patio I hadn’t noticed yet because above me, the canopy was doing something extraordinary. Afternoon light was peeking through the leaves in pieces, breaking apart and scattering across the surface of the water below in a way that made everything shimmer and shift. The brook wasn’t big. But it was alive… trickling over smooth stones, catching the light, pulling every child in the yard directly toward it like gravity.

The adults were on the patio behind me, their laughter rising and falling over the sound of the water. I wasn’t listening. I didn’t care about any of that adult stuff. I was standing at the edge of the creek with my strawberry shortcake sneakers already wet, reaching down to move a stone from one place to another, completely absorbed by the feeling of being exactly where I was.

Cool air rising off the water. The smell of damp earth and dry grass and something faintly sweet that I’ve never been able to name. The sound of other kids splashing, their voices mixing with the stream until it was all just one continuous, beautiful noise.

I didn’t know what landscape design was. I was seven. I had no framework for what it meant that someone had made this place… had seen that tree and placed those stones, routed that water so it would catch the afternoon light in exactly in that way.

I only knew how it made me feel.

And I have never quite forgotten that feeling.

Fast forward about six years.

Jessica’s backyard was the opposite of that place in almost every way.

The house was tiny… one of those Central Coast bungalows where every room bumped up against the next and the backyard was enormous by comparison. Four times the footprint of the house, easy. It had clearly once been something. Now it was overgrown and wild and forgotten, the type of yard that accumulates years of neglect in layers - dead grass over cracked soil over buried rubble over whatever had been there before either of us.

I stood at the back door looking out at it and felt something ignite.

I don’t know whose idea it was to redesign it. Surely it was mine. I think it was always going to be mine.

We pushed through it together, Jessica and I, weeds grabbing at our ankles, sticker burrs pressing through our socks. I didn’t care. I was already seeing something else: the space underneath the overgrowth, the bones of what this place could be. I grabbed a shovel from the side of the house and drove it into the ground, turning over a chunk of soil, and there it was: brick. A paver patio buried under years of dirt, still intact, waiting.

I remember the sound of that shovel smashing stone.

I tore a piece of scratch paper from my school notebook and started scribbling. Not well. Not with any formal knowledge of what I was doing. But I was drawing the yard. The rough shapes and zones, marking where things could go. A seating area here. A path there. Something in the back corner that felt like it wanted to be a fire pit. I was bubble diagramming without knowing what a bubble diagram was. I was programming a space without knowing the word for it.

We dragged two plastic lawn chairs out from under the porch… the old kind, brittle and faded, one of the legs slightly bent. I remember the sound of those chairs scraping over half-buried rocks and broken sticks and the general debris of a yard that hadn’t been touched in years. Bouncing over every obstacle. Not graceful. Not quiet. I set them under the only tree and stood back and looked.

There. That’s where people would sit.

I had no budget. No tools. No training. No idea that what I was doing had a name or a discipline or a five-year degree attached to it. I just had a piece of scratch paper covered in scribbled shapes and an absolute certainty that this space could be something.

That certainty felt like flying.

I grew up in a house with five younger siblings, which means chaos was not an occasional visitor. It was the permanent condition.

My bedroom was in the basement. Big, square, carpeted, no windows. A room that shouldn’t have felt like a sanctuary but absolutely did because I made it one. Over and over again.

Whenever the noise upstairs got to be too much, whenever school felt like too many things pulling in too many directions, whenever I felt that particular kind of stagnation that I couldn’t quite name, I would drag everything out into the basement play area and start from nothing.

The bed first, or sometimes the desk. I’d try it one way, stand in the doorway, feel whether it was right. It usually wasn’t. I’d move it again. I was testing hypotheses without knowing that’s what I was doing. I was running experiments in a carpeted basement laboratory, gathering data about what made a space feel calm versus constrained, open versus exposed, mine versus just a room I happened to sleep in.

A new piece of furniture would arrive and the whole system would get reconsidered. Every element in relationship to every other element. Every arrangement in service of the same quiet goal: a place where I could think clearly. Where I could close the door on everything loud and heavy and outside my control and just breathe.

I needed to own something. Some small square of the world that I had shaped with intention and could reshape when it stopped working. In a house full of people and noise and the general beautiful chaos of a large family, that room was the one thing that was completely, entirely mine.

Looking back, I was learning something in that basement that no classroom had taught me yet. That space is not neutral. That the way a room is arranged changes how it feels to be inside it.

That design is not decoration — it’s decision-making in service of human experience.

That you can take a windowless room in a basement and make it feel like somewhere worth being.

I just didn’t have words for any of it yet.

I think about those three moments a lot now: the brook, the backyard, the bedroom… and what connects them.

In each one I was responding to something. To the feeling a space gave me. To the possibility I saw underneath the overgrowth. To the need for a place that functioned the way I needed it to. I wasn’t inventing from nothing. I was observing, interpreting, responding.

Which is, I’ve come to understand, exactly what environmental design is.

Not expression for its own sake. Response. Careful, specific, human-centered response to what a place is and what it could become.

I didn’t discover this calling. I just eventually found the name for it.

I’m the oldest of six, and one of the things I feel most strongly about for my siblings, and honestly for anyone early in figuring out who they are, is this:

Pay attention to what you keep coming back to before anyone tells you what’s practical.

Not what impresses people. Not what makes sense on a résumé.

What makes you drag a plastic lawn chair across a weed-ridden yard with stickers in your socks because you have an idea for the space and you cannot wait another minute to start.

That feeling is information.

It was always information. We just have to learn to trust it young enough to do something about it.

Is there something you kept coming back to as a kid that you can trace directly to who you are now or what you do? I’d love to know what it was.