he onion nestled at the back of the grill was burning, I remember, papery skin flaking off in rough, uneven wisps.

“It’s fine,” my uncle Doug said, waving a hand at me as he ripped open a pack of halloumi with his teeth. Squeak-cheese, he called it, because of the rubbery sound it made mid-chew in your mouth. “A good barbecue needs some scorch.”

Next to the hedges, the cousins — Colton, nine, and Cameron, five — tumbled across the grass. As Cameron flung herself onto her brother’s back, their shorts dripped with muddy water, remnants from the garden hose. Frank the eagle statue glared from the kitchen windowsill, repelling the woodpeckers attempting to nest in the eaves of our family home.

I stood there watching, tongs in hand. The onion was my assigned responsibility, so I paid no attention to the sweat on my forehead or the pimple threatening to emerge under my chin—just the smoking iron grate, the slip of olive oil between my fingers, and the clamoring sounds of play. It was the summer between middle school and high school, and all I had was time.

When my maternal grandparents moved the family from Hong Kong to Vancouver in the 1980s, they settled on a quiet side street, in this mottled brick house with sloping roofs and rhododendrons by the front walk. Though my mom eventually returned to Hong Kong, where she met my dad, she still made it a point to take me back to her home every year.

Here, I was let loose to explore with the kind of joyous oblivion that exists exclusively in only children who are also oldest cousins, when no real precedent exists for what you can or should do with yourself.

At five years old, I rode a training bike down the back alley, metallic fuschia ribbons streaming from my handlebars as I shot past the garage door — cutting corners from 37th onto Blenheim, pedaling towards Kerrisdale and back out into the main street.

At ten, I plucked barely-ripe fruit from our spindly apple tree and practiced my cartwheels on the concrete back patio, legs flailing inches away from Frank’s carved feathers. Under the weeping cherry in the far-right garden corner, I tore through stacks of my other uncle’s old “Archie” comics with supermarket apple slices in hand. A dish of honey rested by my flip-flopped feet. I liked the editions with Betty and Veronica best, the ones that featured drawings of beach afternoons and fun outfits and endless high school days.

This, I thought, was what I would do when I was grown up: wear collared shirts and polka-dot bikinis, drink cherry-topped diner milkshakes, and talk about big things. There was Work, of course, but that was different. It was something that just happened to people, a secondary feature of their more important personal lives. As I held my books up to the sky, planes flew overhead, airborne tubes carrying rows and rows of people with their own destinations and motivations.

Cameron is 10 now, and Colton 13. They wear neat-pressed jeans, dirty Bermudas abandoned at the back of their closets. She’s learning what a period means (the bodily function, not the punctuation mark), and he peers over the rim of almost-high-school, braces poking at his gums. Soon he’ll know how it feels to take a real exam, to try out for a sports team, to sit alone in the cafeteria for lunch. He’s already started to get taller, gaze rising and voice dropping a little more each time I see him.

I’ve grown too, pale marks forming on the borders of my thighs and my worries stretching with them. While high school led, in my mind, to a single definable college-shaped goal, there now exists the unanswerable question of what a good or successful adult life might look like. I, shoved to the other side of a rather sheltered adolescence, must now somehow write myself into someone people want to hire, accept, sponsor — a neat package who seems employable, who has acquired enough quantitative skills to be worth something. There are clubs to comp, events to attend, students to meet and befriend, people to network with because all the real adults say they’ll be useful someday. I am almost twenty, somehow, and when did time begin to pass so quickly?

Yet Frank still stands on his ledge, even though the birds have long figured out his tricks. He’s been dropped, used as a baseball bat, charred by cooking flames. Still, though his claws have chipped and his painted eyes have dulled somewhat, we’ve kept him around. So he watches, wings tucked politely by his side.

As for me — now, I read on the front steps of Memorial Church. I buy apples from the Whole Foods on Beacon Street and dip them into honey I’ve taken from Annenberg. The flip flops I use when I shower in the dorm are the same ones whose rubber tops I dug into the backyard dirt five years ago.

I’ll return to the Vancouver house in a few months, just like all the summers before. This time, I’ll update my resume in the far corner of the backyard, type out class petitions and send cold emails from the front stoop, take Zoom calls beneath the cherry tree.

But I’ll also take my permit test, and start my first real drive in the back alley. I’ll buy two sparklers on a random day, spinning them around and around on the grass until I stumble, fall, grow hungry. Uncle Doug and I will attempt to start the temperamental barbecue. We’ll fail, of course, but keep trying until it finally pops to life.

Maybe Colton and Cameron will join us this time; we’ll teach them to grill those sweet yellow onions with rainbow trout and squeak-cheese as my grandma tosses salad in the kitchen and everyone else plays backseat commentator for whatever tennis match they can find on TV.

Then, we’ll sit around the picnic table. We’ll reach for our plates as the grass twines soft blades around our feet, and we’ll linger.

— Magazine writer Adrienne Fung can be reached at [email protected].