one nice memory

My pond
Memory is a funny thing for me. It is like a deep pool which I dive into—sometimes it is murky and cold, and I get out fast to dry myself in the sun. Other times it is crystal clear and tropical warm, gentle current rolling, twisting to settle quietly down in the depths. At these times I float on my back and stare up into the blue, or I swim down and sift through the different colored pebbles at the bottom. These are my memories, and I leisurely pick out a beautiful one and hold it in my hand.
The memory I hold now is of a reservoir. It is located on top a rise of land which is nestled between soft sloped mountains and sheltered by a line of tall redwoods running up along the valley. In the winter the fog hung like a curtain between the mountains, providing Ben and I with our own private world. The ferns dripped dew and the pond filled to the brim with murky water and plants grew healthy from the bottom. We crept through rotting leaves and hid behind bushes and went rigid still to listen. The frogs would start up again and the turtles poked their heads from the water. Huge water moccasins glided end to end in search of food. I can see the white light filtered through the rooftop of leaves which was darkly mirrored in the dirty pond. I can see the big lilies sway and the water skeeters skimming trails of passage like jets in the sky.
In that world we were hunters, our objective to trap rather than kill. We filled boxes of frogs and sacks of turtles, jars full of insects and cartons of snakes. It is the path every boy must walk during the magical childhood years. Time was non existential, the world folded in, packed together to become as small as our pond. We hid behind a large fern as a turtle ate a lilly, and Ben, fat and happy, whispered, “you see that”? “Yeah”, I said, “I see it.”
In the summer the reservoir dried up and plates of mud cracked apart like a desert. As I crunched the plates beneath my feet I was a turtle, and this was my home. For that amount of time I lived at the bottom of the pond, swimming under the lilies, ignorant of any world past the walls of tree trunks and the roof of leaves. The sunlight streamed through the water in dancing patterns and the algae lit up and the tadpoles darted here and there. Time was measured only in terms of day and night, winter and summer. I am buoyant; I am quite simply pulled back and forth in the restless water.
I see an ant working hard along the rough terrain of cracked mud and all at once I am with him, sharp, giant cliffs looming overhead, deep caverns slicing jagged along different plateaus like a violent maze. I grow tired of finding my way and become a massive giant, smashing mountains in my path. It is ridiculous how large I am. I pull a mountainous bluff of rocky mud from the very roots of the earth and hurtle it hundreds of miles away, my war cry bellowing, reaching to the ends of the universe. I see Ben—he is with me, and together we destroy everything in our path.
I am sitting now on a soft sandy shoal near the edge of my pond. Sunlight winks on from the surface and dances in the branches of the surrounding trees. I am rubbing my pebble; it is green and smooth, worn down by the passage of water and time. I know that it used to be jagged and sharp, and perhaps looked much different. Maybe it was more beautiful then. I ponder this, and finally decide that it is more beautiful now, and for one reason: not only can I hold it as it is now, I can also imagine it as it was then.