My Gradparent's Creek

My grandparent's lived in a house up on a bank and faced Nat's Creek.  This is not unusual as most houses face the road.  In fact, in older places, you can tell the age of the house when you see if it faces the river, railroad or paved road.  It was natural my grandparent's house faced the creek as the creek was the county road in that area and gave a literal meaning to the old saying, "If the good lord's willing and the creek don't rise".  If the creek got very big you were stuck walking around a footpath on the hillside.

This creek had several different characteristics in the short length where it was the roadbed.  Up the creek near where I was born it was a mostly gravel bottom with scattered large rocks I was told had washed out of Mill Branch during a cloudburst.  It was gravelly with enough larger rocks to make it a great place to catch craw fish.  Then the portion in front of my grandparent's house was kind of deep (relatively speaking) and a little overhung by the willows and weeds.  I never was comfortable in this part of the creek and rarely ever was in it.  In fact when I wanted to go between the portion of the creek above my grandparent's and the portion below them I would climb the hill and hike through the yard and down through the field to the creek below.

The creek below my grandparent's house was also pretty gravelly with far fewer larger stones for craw fish.  I think that is where I spent most of my time when "playing in the creek".  And, one could hear a car coming for a long time and had plenty of chance to move out of the way.

Down the creek between my grandparent's house and where the road came up out of the creek was more sandy than rocky and a person needed to know the creek to now which side of it to hold the car on to to keep from getting stuck in the sand.  They called it quicksand back then but I really think it was only thick sand.

I did enjoy walking down that way as one side of the creek bed was above the water and the other side was kind of deep.  Now, deep in this reference was maybe ten inches.  During normal times at least.

This creek was my favorite thing in the world for some years.  I could not wait until it was warm enough in spring to get in it and dreaded the fall when it got too cold.  Except for winter when it would freeze over and I could go ice skating on it.  Never had any skates.  Just in our leather soled shoes we'd take a run and stop and slide and see how far we could go.  Like the intro to Tony Bourdains's show, "No Reservations".  It was never far, maybe ten feet at the most.  But, it was a world of fun.

That little creek gave me a goodly number of happy times when I was a kid.  But, like most of my childhood, time has destroyed those things except for my memories of them.