A muddy stream trickles through it...

“They're growing houses in the fields between the towns
And the Starlight drive-in movie's closing down
The road is gone to the way it was before
And the spaces won't be spaces anymore.” (“Houses In The Fields” – John Gorka)

If you were ever a kid, and I’m guessing most of you were, you probably remember what it was like to get dirty on a fairly regular basis. And I’m not talking about adult dirty. Adults get dirty as a function of working; mowing the yard, cleaning the house, or maybe hastily digging a shallow grave. Kids, on the other hand, get dirty playing. Their dirt is play dirt, and it is the best thing a human being can wear.

I’ve been looking back over my metaphorical shoulder of late, tracking my footprints back through the ever-deepening dust of time, only to discover the landmarks by which my memory navigates harder to find with each passing year. And it isn’t just my memory that’s fading; the landscape of my past is changing with time. More and more of the places that were home to my memories exist now only in those memories; the real places are either gone, or so significantly changed as to bear no resemblance to the places I once knew.

When I was in elementary school, there was a creek that ran through an expanse of woods adjacent to the school grounds. We kids called this creek and the woods through which it ran the Mini-Brook. Too many years have come and gone since then for me to give an accurate accounting as to how much time I spent playing in and along the banks of that creek, or how many miles I logged riding my banana-seat bike (with playing cards clothes-pinned to flap against the spokes so they made engine noises as I rode) along the myriad trails carved through those woods by the kids who rode before me. Of course, to me back then those paths simply were; like the trees, the burbling waters, and the sky. They always had been and always would, and I would play forever there, because—while I was there—there was everything.

When I think back on it today, it feels as though there was a magic bubble through which only young boys on banana-seat bikes could pass, and within which the Mini-Brook ran. Time meant nothing there. I spent countless millennia digging clay from those muddy red banks in a single day. It felt as though the sun paused in the sky to watch as I raced between its green and gold rays along the paths cut through those woods, a one-eyed Jack chasing a tattered queen as I rode. Scrapes acquired there healed more quickly, soggy sneakers dried faster, as did any tears that made it across the threshold from the outside world.

I manage to get back home a couple of times a year these days, and I made time to take a walk behind my old elementary school this past summer. The Mini-Brook is still there, but where once it ran wild through vibrant woods, today it slips quietly unnoticed past the backyards of neighborhoods that grew up where once only those timeless trees stood. Fences block the breezes that once stirred the long grass along banks now overgrown with thickets and thorns. The fabled creek of my memory has been ripped out of the world and replaced by a drainage ditch.

As I stood there that day, I felt as though I’d stopped by an old friend’s home after many years away, only to find that he had died. It felt wrong to be touched by sadness in that place, even when I knew that that place no longer existed. This is silly, I thought. I’m mourning the passing of a stream. I laughed at the thought, which in and of itself felt more appropriate to the memories I’d made there. Yes, the Mini-Brook would have wanted me to smile, I thought, and laughed at myself even more.

And then, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a small, blonde head appear briefly over the fence and disappear. I turned to face the spot where it had appeared, and it immediately appeared and disappeared again. And then again. And again. Each time the head broke a little higher over the horizon of dog-eared boards. By about the fifth bounce (the fifth of which I was aware) I could see the broad smile on the face of the child on the trampoline in the yard where those magic woods once stood. I recognized that smile; I knew that magic. And I realized that trees can be felled, and the land can be parceled up into tidy boxes by adults and their fences, but that magic—the magic of a child at play in the world—is forever.