Growing up, I traipsed incessantly the murky, muddy bottomlands that fed nearby rivers, places where life and death mingle. Bottomlands, entropy’s regenerative playground, are connective tissue, shuttling a watershed’s hilltop rains and spring snow melts back to the regathered run of a river. Laying like limbs akimbo, these river flanking, low-lying areas are prone to flooding, decay and regeneration. Play among bottomlands’ thickets and culverts overtook my being, altering me at a genetic level. Summer’s shouted dares redounded like sun bouncing off water. Winter’s stones tossed from woolen mittens scored the ice, as if left by a receding glacier. Spring peepers sang day into night and moonlight skittered on icy rivulets under winter’s bare branches. When we moved to an urban area, bottomlands became concreted streams, scattered with beer cans, tires and the occasional shopping cart—crayfish darting, slipping through fingers and swimming on. During the pandemic I was shunted into bottomlands, their regenerative powers at play once again.
