When I was very young I lived nowhere near water. I lived in a suburban house with a suburban backyard punctuated by privet hedges. I longed for a stream or a pond, but I only had a hammock, strung between two maple trees. I spent my summers on that hammock, eating chocolate chips and reading books that got stickier and stickier as the sun moved across the sky. It was bliss, but something was missing.

That something was mud.

I don't know how I first got the idea to create a mudpuddle beneath the hammock, but I do know that once I began my mudward journey, it became impossible to stop.

I'd take the snarled garden hose from its perch and turn on the chilly water to a barest trickle. And then I'd put the hose beneath the hammock and work the water with my bare feet into the dirt. The chocolate and the words were sweet and I would move my toes through the soft warm mud as the puddle grew deep beneath me.

I learned all the textures of mud I could create, learned all the particular tree roots I might encounter, learned how to dig out clumps of grass with my toes as the puddle grew ever wider. I learned how to lose myself in nature as my feet disappeared in the mud.

Or more precisely, I learned how to keep myself from unlearning a state of natural bliss. The privet hedges may loom in rigid lines all around us, but the mud must always prevail. It is more real than anything else.