Growing up in the midwest doesn’t provide one – especially one who is part of a family of limited means – to experience things that say a kid on the west or east coast gets to experience. That is, kids in the mid-west don’t get to experience water in quite the same way. While some kids get to experience the oncoming of waves and ever so forceful tug of a tide….us mid-westerners got to swim in pools, not-so-big lakes…and if we were really lucky, playing in bubbling creeks.
* One in Lenexa, KS out behind the local neighborhood pool, right over there by the park. You could cross over a bridge if you were boring…or if you were a little more adventurous…you could hop across the rocks that jetted out of the passing water. You didn’t have to be that adventurous really – even as a young girl of 6 or 7 I was doing this traversing.
* In high school, back in good ol’ “Funster” (Munster, IN) there was a creek we would go to out in one of the newer subdivisions of town…at night in order to escape the watching “eyes” of the town. To party is why we were there…nothing big and out of control, usually just small groups of us…but it was “cool” to drink – while some smoked more than just cigarettes – sitting around on the rocks beside the creek and just shooting the breeze.
* In Texas, well it wasn’t really a creek at all that kids would play in. It was actually Rogers Wood Street that would gather with semi-fast moving water during and after a hard rain – seeing as the bedrock of south Texas had no chance of keeping up with the down pour of water. And I actually wasn’t a kid at this point…well maybe I still was at the age of 18. But I had fun with my baby cuz at that time playing and splashing in the ankle high waters.
By far, though, my favorite memory of any creek I lived near was when I was about 3, maybe 4 years old (I know – can you believe I can remember back that far?). The fam and I had just moved out of the great state of Kansas to the hopping, thriving state of….Arkansas.
For the longest time, actually up until this past summer when I finally decided to do some fact checking on my life, I had thought is was Little Rock that my mom had moved us to. I even have a page in my childhood scrapbook dedicated to LR, AK…which I guess I should change some how at this point.
No, not only did my mom move us out of Kansas where all of our family lived – she moved us to the boondocks of Arkansas. To a little town in the northwestern most part of the state where supposedly the next big retirement community was going to pop up. She now had her real estate license and was going to make a killing. I have faint suspensions that maybe my mother was a “Name it, claim it” type…and my mother had enough drive to make it if anyone did – at least I like to think so of my late mother.
I actually remember quite a bit from this short year or so we lived down in the boondocks. I had what was a childhood right of passage back then – the chicken pox – in this remote part of the world. I remember the itching so bad you wanted to crawl right out of your skin. That combined with the extremely high fever that landed me in one of those baking soda baths. I really do not know how I survived the week.
I can remember being in preschool – if it was even preschool back then – where I had probably contracted the aforementioned. My brother was a few years older than I, but I remember him coming into this place in the afternoons…so maybe it was just the daycare.
My paternal grandparents came down to visit us once, and I remember being in the small downtown with them where we bought one of those foam planes you put together and then can go fly. I so enjoyed that my grandparents drove all that way (really just a few hours, but still) to come see me (well, and the bro…but I was the real reason) and having the best time showing them around our new town.
My mom said her vows to a new man in the boondocks, in our home that backed up to a creek. The exchange of vows took place in front of a beautiful wooden partition screen that my parents had brought back from Saudi Arabia… that now sits in my living room. She wore a white cotton dress, short-sleeved, mid-length, elastic gathered waist with flowers pinned to her left shoulder (okay, okay I am TOTALLY cheating here…I have the picture in that album listed under LR :-0). Wow, I just did the math and in this picture she would have been my age that I am today. Wow….
Chuck was his name…and he was never a favorite of mine. Just another man in what would become a long line of men that wouldn’t give me a good impression of the opposite sex. About the only thing I remember liking of this guy was the fact he brought 2 sisters into my life, even if for only a short time. Heather and Michelle Moore. They lived in Wellsville, KS – another thriving metropolis which I would call home for a bit after AK. Chuck would drive to pick them up when it was his turn to have them…and I remember all of us kids and Chuck piling into the car one time and driving throughout the night to return them to their mom while my bro and I drove back with Chuck. I wonder what the girls felt as they saw their dad drive off with children that weren’t his own. I know I would have given him back to them if I could have…but I can’t imagine it could have been easy for them.
I am and have always been a girl of the water. To say I love being in the water is an understatement. So the fact that I could just step out onto the back porch and see water at the bottom of what my lil’ girl mind thought was a gigantic hill (especially coming from KS)…the fact that my bro could take me down to play in that water…it must have made me so content.
I don’t remember how big this creek was. It must have been bigger than the other creeks I mention above for I think I remember inter-tubing at some point. But then again, I was only 3 or 4 and who knows if my memories are to be trusted completely. However, I am sure that we spent as many hours as we could playing out back there, traversing the “wild” back yard we had moved into…and I have very faint memories of being sad to leave the boondocks of AK – where people were few and nature was plenty.
The few faint memories of this locale will forever be a fond dot in the landscape of my short-lived childhood. Perhaps it’s because it was the last locale where my mom was whole …literally. I had visions of going back to the boondocks this past summer to see if I could resurrect any more memories of my mom and our time there, before my life really started to fall apart at its core.
See, we moved back into the urban area of Overland Park, KS, after this…and that is when my mother started to get sick with cancer. Not even a year later – while living in Wellsville, KS and in my first year of school – my mother would fly up to the Mayo clinic with a whole body…but come home with some of it missing. She left a bit of her left leg up there at Mayo – and a bit of her spirit as well.
“So, what sparked this chain of reminisce down memory lane?” I hear you asking.
Well, I am not too sure actually. It could have been that as I strolled throughout my neighborhood this week, I happened upon a remote hiking area where – lo and behold – there was a creek that I could “bravely” traverse across in less than 10 steps. A little babbling brook at the bottom of a steep hill, meandering through what seems like an untouched, forgotten landscape of the Bay Area. It was so peaceful – no industry, no cell phone towers, no people – nothing around but water, tall trees and faint reminders of civilization.
I had taken my ear buds out so I could listen to the water bounce along the rocks…and found a new song in the birds chirping all around and the sounds of a forest encompassing me. I thought of how fun this place will be to bring my kids to when it is warmer…to let them play in a creek just like their mama used to…to build memories with them that will hopefully last a lifetime.
I could have stayed there for hours, just letting my mind drift, thinking of nothing, thinking of everything. It was completely invigorating…and it reminded me that – while I love city life – that we are not made to live this high paced, catch ’em if you can, keep up with the Jones kind of life. We came from the Earth, we will one day return to the Earth…and in the middle I think it really does a soul good when we spend time being in nature, taking in the creation and the mastery of it all. Letting our minds go completely blank and just enjoying the sounds of our ancestry. Not doing anything at all…but doing something profoundly deep and spiritual at the same time – being still…a practice and an art that has all but become extinct in this day and age.
So, while I felt the pressure of time pushing down hard on my heart as the city streets were less than a mile away and reminders of all I needed to get done loomed just out ahead…I forcibly pushed all this away – at least arm distance away – paused and just stood still, watching the creek make its way down its path…
