A Creek Runs Through It

The wellspring of wisdom is a flowing brook. Proverbs 18:4

Sitting on the banks of my creek I hear it babbling to me of memories and metaphors.

I saw it first at three years old when we moved to the country from the city. For a month we used the water to wash clothes until my father piped water from a spring.

Shallow in those days and sandy, we could walk in the creek. My father drove the tractor and car over it. A tall weeping willow swayed above it. My cousins and I played in the water building castles, dams, forts, and cities from coarse brown granules of sand.

We went barefoot in the creek, but the adults needed a bridge. My father built a cement one over the deepest part where the minnows liked to hang out. Frogs, a few crayfish, and water striders also inhabited the creek. The larger minnows hid under the bridge. But occasionally an ominous dark creature slithered from under the bridge, turned around and went back; like the snake in the Garden of Eden he came to invade our territory.

The creek continued as a playground during my growing-up years. Early on my father noticed it eroding and changing course. He hauled rocks from a nearby river and stacked them on one side to protect our yard. Storms caused damage, and one summer took down our beautiful weeping willow.

Years passed, I left home, and my father died. My husband and I came to live here, and he continued to fortify the creek’s edges. But the creek insisted on changing course over time. Next we cemented the rocks into the sides like a misshapen wall, and a deeper gorge appeared after each heavy storm.
The storms come more frequently these days. They’ve torn away some of the cemented rock. During one we feared for the sycamore tree on the house side, but an avalanche of sand rushed down the creek building a beach and holding it in place. On the opposite side, erosion took out grass leaving high banks. I wonder how far it will go in that direction.

I contemplate the history of the creek moving over time. I think it’s like my life. It wanders and changes course. The creek is not the same one of my childhood.

But It streams memories of my family. It’s witnessed happiness and tragedy. The creek runs through my thoughts of this place—the farmhouse, the sheds, the tractor—they’re all still here. And I’ve been back for decades now. But I, like the creek, am ever-moving, ever-changing, in body and mind but still the same and needing not just rocks, but the Rock of Ages to sustain me.