...my family moved from the city out into the country, a little suburb of cookie-cutter houses built out in what used to be a cow pasture. It was still surrounded by dairies and farms.

The County had bulldozed a grid of deep ditches around the neighborhood in order to drain water away from the houses. They were straight drainage ditches, and the white sugar sand that had been dug up to create them was heaped on either side to help keep the water in as it flowed to the main drainage canal by the road.

It didn't take long before vegetation took over on the banks, and the ditches filled with algae and water weeds. Soon followed the local fauna; insects, little fish, snails, frogs, turtles and snakes, and the inevitable and ubiquitous long-legged pond birds. The bare spots were covered by the tracks and scat of small mammals, foxes, coons, 'possums. At low water in dry season the water was only inches deep, barely moving, but it teemed with life, life that had colonized it in just months. It was clean, clear, and alive. After a big storm the ditches would be scoured clean, but in a matter of days it seemed the plants and critters came right back.

I remember spending hours sitting on the banks, under a shrub for shade, watching mosquito fish and aquatic insect larvae prowling about through the tiny underwater jungles, tiny dragons swimming through miniature kelp forests--tiny submerged cathedrals inhabited by little jeweled dragons. On the bare patches of sand could be traced out the geometrical ripple marks laid down by the slow current, marked by the dinosaur prints of the herons and egrets.

Everything seemed sharp and clear and bright. Everything seemed to glisten, to sparkle. And it smelled clean, fragrant. Not the stagnant odor of death and sheen of oil that seems to be a part of all ditches and canals now.

Yes, it was good. It was very, very good.