Puddles

Puddles are amazing. As a six year old I loved to play around the puddles on our gravel road in the 1960s’. The road has since been paved and has lost all of its character.

A mud puddle has a short life, but creates a lasting impact on a curious mind. I saw them as miniature oceans, seas and lakes. They had islands, ports, whales, sharks and boats.

Pine needles made great ships. They would always cling to an island or the shore. The gravel formed buildings in city blocks. There were beaches, bluffs, mountains and valleys and patches of nearby grass were the forests. They had everything.

When there wasn’t any wind, I made waves, sailed pine needle boats and set the position of black rock whales where ever I needed them. Always far away from the white sharp gravel sharks.

Each Puddle had its own unique character, one completely different from the other. Each time it rained there was always something new to discover.

They had wonderful shapes, some long and wide and some short and deep. The tire tracks made great bays. Sometimes I would connect them together with a canal. Every now and then I accidentally drained one ocean into another with my canal. It was fun to watch the rivers flow.

I imaged countries ringed the puddle ocean with the city ports. If you looked closely there were tiny people that looked like grains of sand. There were deep parts of the ocean as well as the shallows. The boats would get blown with the wisps of typhoon winds.

I made underwater canals with sticks, created islands and watched the glitter of gold from time to time. This is how I imagined the world to be. A bigger version of the puddle. I had the ocean at my door step.

What if we were just grains of sand in the universe and somebody was looking down on our puddle? That though crossed my mind and it made a lot of sense. There were funny tiny bugs that came and went. Some of them couldn’t swim and just floated around the 7 seas until I rescued them.

One day I would really sail the 7 seas, and so I did. I joined the Navy and sailed the Pacific, Atlantic oceans and the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas. I was right. They were just big puddles.