BEACH OR BUSH?

In the plastic sleeve of a long-lost photo album, there’s an image of ten-year-old me seated in the dry bed of an outback creek, patting a bull terrier. A bygone flood event had carved a channel through red sand plains, leaving two banks of solidified soil to delineate the creekbed. This bed, on which I was sitting, was patterned with footprints, old and new. The fresh ones bore the clearly defined tread of sneakers, while all that was left of the older were amorphous contours — with the hollow imprint remaining but the details smoothed out by outback downpours and scouring winds.

My memory