Twas also I who ate the pie and passed the cake to me

There's this puddle in my front yard. It's a pretty big puddle and it comes whenever it rains or snows, any kind of precipitation happens, it shows up. It's got a history as weird as it sounds. It's called 'Lake Lenny' after my Dad, and it's sort of lake-like considering it takes up most of our yard when it comes to visit. Sort of like Frosty The Snowman... he shows up, hangs out for a while, melts, and comes back again some day. That's Lake Lenny.

When I was little I was small enough to sit in the center in my underwear. That's how I remember it most of the time; getting really excited when it rained and stripping down to barely anything to throw myself against the itchy, sandy ground over and over again until it stopped raining or I started shivering, whichever came first. Splashing was easy, fun, and it didn't matter how dirty you got, at least not to me because I was four and I didn't care about hardwood floors or tiles that were bigger than my feet. I even learned to pseudo ice skate on that puddle. (I suck at anything that requires an object being strapped to my feet for movement, mind you. I can't rollerskate, rollerblade, ice skate, ride a bike, or even wear those roll-y shoes 'cause I fall. I fall very hard, and very a lot.) They were kind of primitive ice skates though. I strapped them to my white hi-top Reeboks and fell all over the place. I gave up after about five minutes because that's my style. Try twice, give up three times. But that's only with certain things.

Now I just run over Lake Lenny with my car. I crack up the thin layer of ice when there's still frigid water beneath the surface, or just skid right over it when it's too hard to budge. It's still there, though. It's the complete opposite of random, it's large, and it's never changed. If there's one thing I know will be here long after I'm dead, it's that puddle. That puddle will be a lake some day when my house becomes too old and ricketty to stand up. When everyone I know and love is dead, when the world is taken over by aliens and we drive cars in tubes above the trees some little futuristic space kid will look down and see my puddle. He'll wonder what it is, and when his parents give him some omipotent dictionary definition he'll shake his head like he understands but he won't because he's never felt the water from my puddle on his skin when he was four, nor will his parents because they didn't name the puddle before I came. He won't understand a swirl of the finger mixing dirt and rock and sharp, unidentified brickle in my puddle. The puddle that was theirs before it was mine.