about me: one time I was playing with my neighborhood friends in the woods behind their house

our development was intended as a young-families thing but they mostly went to the cheaper Colonial Greene down the road so it turned into a kinda age-in-place retirement community, there were like 8 young families and all the kids were years older than me but I was clever

anyway we were playing in the creek between the houses and the woods

the creek was natural but it was also overflow for the sewage treatment facility the woods were buffering against, it honestly didn’t smell or anything and it was just this secret government facility we even snuck into a few times but disappointing

the creek on another side of the development we explored once and there was a sealed-off abandoned oil drum which seemed exciting! because in the ‘80s that was a common pulp movie plot device

in retrospect that was probably the real phenomenon of “clandestinely abandoned industrial waste now that they started regulating that in the ‘70s” that those plot devices were riffing off

later the farm on the other side of THAT creek became an office park and even fancier McMansionier houses (we were the original territory of Toll Brothers)

BUT ANYWAY one time I was playing with my neighborhood friends in the woods behind their house and we found a dead frog in the creek

and they told me I should conduct a burial for it, I guess cause I was the egghead of the group and in retrospect I was probably more freaked out than anyone and they were taunting me

but I took it seriously and gathered them around and improvised a sermon from what I remembered about the women going to find the stone to Jesus’ tomb rolled back and the tomb empty and going to tell the disciples and committing the frog’s soul to eternity