Love and Memories

I remember when I was a kid, my brother and I used to plan out having an animal sanctuary in our backyard. We drew up very elaborate plans about where the different types of animals would be so as to best accommodate them all. The house I grew up in had a huge backyard. As I've talked about before, one side of the yard held The Aqueduct of Doom. The rest of the yard was a veritable kids' paradise. There was a swing set, complete with a slide (that I once tried to ride a tricycle down), a playhouse with a tire swing in the tree next to it, a tree house in a different tree (there were a lot of trees), an above-ground pool, and finally there was a chicken coop. For the chickens.
Our plans almost always centered around the playhouse. This would alternately serve as a reptile room (my brother always wanted to be a herpetologist) or an area for smaller rodents. We planned to put horses in the back corner, near where the chicken coop was. Oddly enough, the people that moved into my old house did put horses there, so perhaps we were on to something. Over near The Aqueduct of Doom, we had an area that was already sectioned off from the rest of the yard; I think at one time it had been a dog run. We were going to convert that area into something for climbing type animals, like monkeys, bush babies, lemurs, and the like.
The rest of the yard would be dedicated to large cats, since I was mildly obsessed with them. I think we may have planned to have otters or seals or penguin in the pool at various points in time.The one animal that we never included in our plans were bears. My brother used to have recurring nightmares about bears eating us and him trying to rescue us from said bears.
Once we had all of our animals in place, we were going to open our backyard for admission and give tours and teach people about the different types of animals and why they were important.