The Creek Behind my House

     When I scavenge through ten year old memories, I remember the creek behind my house.
A strange familiarity of this place still calls to me and tells me to come home. To once again, climb down those concrete slopes and watch tadpoles swim around swiftly. My brother and cousin would venture down the creek, and find tiny frogs they would captivate in plastic boxes, for me, to watch them grow and die.
I am a frog sometimes, growing and gazing at life through a clear container, tapping into the future through larva-licked past.
     Decalescent summers gave way to an unkempt winter; it had finally snowed in northern Texas, the white flakes of innocence getting caught on my tongue as I faced heaven with an open mouth. The snow bank sat at the bottom of the creek, so I forayed down the icy path. I collected fistfuls of snow until my nose was a bright red and numbness lingered on my fingers, cold and limp like frozen fish sticks. I tried climbing up the creek to go back home, but my feet kept slipping on the gray ice before me. I managed  to climb up diagonally and scurry home, whose warmth pressed itself against me and held me for a minute.
     Hollow tunnels ran down the creek, I remember exploring them once with my friend, and getting stuck in the gray paste while trying to cross through. At the time I thought it was quick sand which quickly enveloped my zipper-show while I tried to save my friend from the disastrous thickness that was licking the tips of our toes, readying its desire to consume us whole. We scrubbed the dirt off of our skin and went back later to retrieve my lost shoe, but unbeknownst to my knowledge,the quick sand was dried into a rocky slab of gray.
     The memories are vague and shallow like the creek that sat behind my house, waiting to be ran across and explored. They remain faintly in my mind, washed out like stains trampled by rainfall. Although I don't remember much of this place, I know a part of me still belongs to the vacant creek that is still there today, lonely and old it too still grows. The shrubs that cling to the surface are the few signs of life, an oasis of mortality, dancing with ten year old memories I left behind.