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When I was about four years old, my parents put in a vegetable garden at the bottom of the hill below our house. My dad also built a small clay dam, using local native clay, across the minuscule stream that separated the garden from the road. This created one of my favorite places: a little pond eight feet long, four feet wide, and five inches deep, but that's not the point here. My favorite part of the garden was the worm snake my dad found while initially digging up the soil. The garden was eventually abandoned in favor of a new one that was much closer to the house. The old one was kept alive for a while, because it contained a row of asparagus, but then was allowed to become a weedy plot and, eventually, forest.