what is it?

Rain flooded the ditches, flooded the streets, sent us out into the streets in old sneakers, me with no shirt dancing drops spat out at us the size of grapes - warm, perfect liquid hail and down my browned body through the shorts and into the oldest sneakers with no socks, squedge, squedge, ankles itching from the grass. The street was free, rioting, the BJs older sister’s cousin’s high bed pickup with a rope tied on. Just lighter than milk chocolate melted and swirling with a yellow tinge, or coffee with powdery creamer, the ditchwater came up to the raindrops and shook hands as they flowed clear and crawfish yellowdirt into each other’s arms. One of the BJs would take off on the surfboard holding on to the rope for dear life and glory. up the block, turnings and slidings and a splashing shearing wake to ride and surf or warily hold tight to the mailbox trying to keep your mouth shut because that was like sewer water down there in the ditches. Where the delicate pond weeds, small rocks, blackness of twigs acidifying in the pineneedle soil under clear water - the pondweed with the small leaves like babys breath or the imagination of watercress and dragon nymphs hawking wild in there on good days among the minnows and frog eggs. It was delicate. Microscope water was good there. Where, when it was all the yellowtan mud like the coat of the infinite whippets bred by the BJs mysterious family? It is right, it is good, come down, rain, come up, ditchwater, swampwater for you have not fooled me and my father has told me about the cypresses. We watched the tadpoles start to change a while back. Down the grey prosaic cement of of our street just beyond there is the swamp and the blackwater, where there was a cypress there is now a champion, a victory, where there was sand, water, bent knee roots stickin out, and the peat laying down waiting for the bodies destined for the bog, now there are new white, white as snow roadbeds with candy yellow bumps down the middle and curbstones with paint. The streets ghost streets to me on my bike in the non-rainy days, smooth to a skateboard, and the forest all between. Light, never a clear light because a humid wavering swampness, the scraggle and rag and tag of the aspens or willows, pines marking the high spots. Grey sand dotted with the black wet wood. Once in the shallow sand ditch behind the fence on the border between the old road, our old pebbly sugar melting granular road through the houses, adn the new frosted smooth knived skateboard road through the woods, there was alley or shallow ditch that had been the ruts of large earth moving equipment, there we go to feel the clay sand mud smooth and perfect in our toes, because the warm rain has set our feet free, our feet hard callused dark brown from walking across black tar parking lots barefoot when the tar’s melting in the hundred degree sun, melting so you breathe it. These brutal feet of ours long for the cooled mud - a texture very like cornstarch and ashtray sand - smooth and siftable but for the little black charcoals of the bad teenagers that would sit out here make a fire which is the source of fear because there could be glass from those drunks. The earth moving machinery has never been seen but its ruts wore deep enough to make this an honorary ditch. Julie is out! We meet. Come on! You have to see! Because, because. I sweep her with me to the temple. As we arrive in the sand alley between forest worldroad and house worldroad we see that the sand is all black and the puddle, the ditch, is alive with tiny, perfect, beautiful frogs. Froglets! I am wearing no shirt and the grape-rain pelts me. One pelts me right at the crown of my head and as I have been reading a book stolen from the 6th grade classroom about zen I think “auuum... shower in light” as the top of my head chakra opens up to the rain and I realize I am a little near-naked froglet. Akela would bend his head to sniff me and accept. We pick them up, we nudge them aside with our toes squinching forward in the mud. Tiny perfect feet, soft damp bumps. Roughness. The frogs pee on our hands in fear. The Murph’s house is flooding again surely and there will be soggy rolls of carpet laid out by the mailbox and adult head-shaking all week. The frogs riot joy fear hunger. How can they all live. Where does the river run? It is just a ditch. It doesn’t go anywhere. It runs into the street. There is a gutter here in the new forest road. The gutter runs into our ditches. Our ditches run down into the big ditch on Victory Forest Road. The BJs come up yelling and we yell and we will not let them ruin our darling frogs the frogs of miracle because the BJs are a pack of savage wild children no one can understand with their blond fluff on all of them, how many, 7, 9, one for every year, running wild all around and the oldest one a girl Melissa my age with freckles and long straight honey blond hair she liked to swing behind her to feel its weight to have maybe 9 little brothers nearly naked all named something like BJ or RJ or Jimbo running around hooked up to the back of cousin Earl’s muscle truck and now in this mud fight where we backed off almost immediately since against a swarm of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 year olds, there is no defense if you are not willing to drown them in the warm muddy street. We went back to dancing, diving, swimming, getting out pool toys. Danica’s mother whose hair was always neatly combed and whose little brother was a thug would not allow it as she thought the water was germy. Salman and Zainab on the corner stayed inside and I wondered why. On a raft on the muddy amazon we battled alligators. Once, another time of rain like this, I had a shirt on, so older, driving home in the blue ford pinto station wagon, water swirled up under my feet, under my mother’s feet. One of us or both, or was this years later with me driving? had kicked a hole right thorugh the rusted shell of the carpet-less front seat floor and against the model airplane metallic flake paint blue of the car interior, now that ochre swirl, warm and shameful like wetting your pants, somehow my fault or her fault or mine from my faulty navigation but we backed up and got out before the car stalled up to our knees or my knees possibly her short knees little and birdlike and helpless never knowing what to do but doing it anyway my mom. Now in the warm grape juice rain which I like to think could be wine, wine, wine, dionysus, frogs, vines, grow on this truck and ford pinto station wagon and lead me to the leaping sea. Now the rain is just sheets and sheets of the waterblobs like waterballoons with no shell-impact to them and only gentle explosion that could be blood. My sister like a little elf in a dirty tshirt to her knees and no pants and her thin hair straggling down the color of the yellow mud and an enormous grin all the way splitting her face up and radiating. We leap and are mustangs. We run the Grand National and fall at Becher’s. We do the nes-tea plunge. Our parents watch us from the windows from the maybe 2 foot rise of hill above the ditch that saves our house from having its carpets rolled up every time like Mr. Murph. We wave and run off through the hip deep water to the forest road again. The frogs have scattered. It is getting dark. Someone has a flashlight. I would have liked to go on the surfboard at the back of the truck in its screaming wake, but knew it would get me in deep trouble. The forest, the ghost of the forest with some slender trees marked by orange plastic tags like crepe paper party streamers, but durable in the rain; a fallen tree of a kind I didn’t know, maybe a cypress, bark smoothly absent, muscle-knotted twisty, fallen across two other trees with the wet rough black pine bark, clearly a good place to build a tent or a lodge shelter if I had an army and not a laughing swirling mob with me, or if the trees were good trees and strong trees that I understood like the fir we left behind in our old yard in the thumb-crook of michigan, trees that could be climbed, understood, loved, fruit picked, flowers picked, sheltered under, not these skinny pillars into hazy nowhere with no branches sticking out till god knows when and no shade either, no bushes, no shelter, no purpose or use but to be chopped down or carved on or charred with drunken initials or spray painted “cougars rule” . It was clear the trees would soon be completely gone, the sand, the trees, the fallen trees, the wheel ruts, the frogs, and so I tried my hardest to love them while I had the chance. And it was true, they were gone soon and the only nature I’d see in that part of the world for a long time would be the blackberry brambles at the broken down fences of El Rancho.