Standing on the deck, you can see the creek, a dark, pencil-thin line. You can tell it needs to be raked out, but you stay where you are. Your father has not asked you to clean that creek in quite some time, and you wonder how it has survived without you. You realize, looking down at it, that the creek will be there long after you’re gone. Some days, in preparation for summer, you toss a towel out on the hard deck floor and lie there. You can see the patio beneath you if you squint and stare between the gaps in the wood. Everything is cast in shadow, but you know that things are gathering dust, and spiders are crawling among the settled logs, spinning up webs that will go undisturbed until the spiders themselves are carcasses. * * * You begin to wonder just how many animals are living in your backyard. The moles come and go in waves, and although you know that your parents have buried two cats in their backyard, you only remember the death of one of them. But as you wander through the grass in your flip flops when it is warm outside and the grass needs to be cut at least twice a week but is only chopped down once, you want to find a place to drive a cross made from tree branches into the ground. You want to remember them, even if they will not remember you.
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