Memory

Walking down our driveway, turning north to walk to the top of Gulf Road, I cross the stream that runs out of the pond on our neighbor’s property.  The sound of it, even more than the sight of it, reminds me of a favorite book I read over and over as a kid.  It was the beautifully illustrated “Adventures Downstream”, now sadly out of print.  It told the story of a bee named Buttercup and a snail named Hodnedod who turn a wooden shoe they discover into a boat in which they travel together down the stream to the ocean.  It was a charming story of friendship, creativity, courage and adventure. I was perhaps eight years old when I fell under its spell.

We had a lovely little stream in Amenia that ran through the woods from our lake to the bigger lake on the neighboring property. Just barely out of sight of the house in those days, before Dad had a lot of brush cleared away, there was the first of three wooden bridges that our dirt road crossed going the half mile from the house to town. There was a sweet place to play there, where the stream came out from under the bridge.  Inspired by Adventures Downstream, I spent hours there in a fantasy world of my own, constructing houses fit for a bee and a snail, building a pier where they could land their boat, planting a garden for them.

It was such a rich time in my life. The road had large patches of clay, red with the local iron ore, that turned into beautiful, smooth mud after a rain.  I could make little bowls of it, shaped on the tops of my fingers and then dried in the sun.  The mud on Gulf Road on this rainy weekend has the same texture.  I don’t stop on my walk to make bowls from it, but I am awfully careful of my footing, as the mud is as slippery as ice.

The gurgling of the stream and the sheen of the mud carry me back to those summer days spent in an imagined world. The child that I was then feels close here.  Maybe that’s part of the pull of this place for me, the access to memories that seemed remote in the traffic on 101. I walk more here, even in the cold.  And my walks, like those long ago summer walks are filled with quiet, with the smell of damp, dead leaves, with the glint of light on a rushing stream. There is the calling of crows, and this weekend the clear call of a redwing blackbird. I feel the same magic walking here that I felt then, room for imagination, room for a still mind, room for breathing.

It will be a joy to have grandchildren here while they are still young enough to spend hours playing in a stream, while they still have access to their story telling selves, while they still have no more important work to do than to make a little bowl out of smooth mud.