Distant Memory

Thick frosty steam would billow off of that petit pond in elegant breaths of precipitation.
The frigid water, quietly rippling under those rising clouds, would sing songs in a foreign, mysterious tongue that no one, yet everyone could somehow understand.
Nature was its mother tongue. Nature is the universal tongue…

A bumpy frog croaked every now and then, imploding the fresh, numbing silence,
And then waiting just long enough for it to be imploded again and again…and again.
Those wet, pea green, earth-bound frogs…

The silence surrounding that haven of evaporating wisdom was my childhood,
My innocent garden of thought.
A rickety bench, perched atop a cluster of large swampy grass-covered rocks
Would catch the time with its wooden limbs, and age, as the silence grew and vanished…and grew and vanished and layers of lichen
Would swarm peacefully around its moist, wooden body.
I loved that bench and it loved me back,
Or so I pretended.
The March pond was my pond, my vacation and my solemn womb of growth.
It was the most common reflection in my leafy grey eyes…
But when the first wing of the blood red, red bird gaily sliced through those rising clouds of winter mist, the reflection was seasoned with splashes of crimson noise…and my vacation was up.
I went home and would wait until the last snowflake of the following year fluttered prettily to the earths crust…and then I would return.

It is always a distant memory as near as its reflection in my leafy grey, childhood eyes.