The best part of my day is always my walk. I try to walk for an hour everyday, even in inclement weather. It keeps me bonded with the earth. I can usually get out there everyday up until January, when the cold makes it too difficult for me to breathe. As soon as March comes I am out there again. I am fortunate to live right next to a beautiful creek and many of my walks are along its banks. I had been so glad when we first moved here that our boys would have a creek, thinking of my own childhood roaming another creek so many years ago. The creek was a sacred place for me as child. I wandered down there to contemplate, to be alone, to hear the water. I had had a transformative experience at my own creek when one day I wandered way further than I ever had previously and came upon a side path. Perfect trees lined this unexpected pathway. They were the kind of trees seen maturing on manicured yards, the kind with forts built into their lush branches. I also noticed that this branch of the path was covered in wood chips. At the time I thought it was a naturally occurring phenomenon. I half expected God to appear in a flash of sunlight. The shoreline widened at the end of this path, and through a halo of branches soft sand gathered in a crescent in the small nook of land at the point where the creek began to bend like a giant elbow. I didn’t know what to think. It was like a fairytale. A tire swing languidly dangled from a high branch. I didn’t dare move. I stayed there forever, mesmerized by paradise. When I turned to go home I noticed a fence and camouflaged behind high bushes and lilac trees there was a gate. The gate seemed to lead back into the real world, an equally stunning discovery. I felt cheated without really knowing why.

The boys never really took to the creek. They went down there once in awhile to skateboard down a paved hill there. Eventually as teens they ran into trouble at what is known as the stairs. The teens hang out here to smoke weed and drink alcohol stolen from their parents. The area is full of garbage. Bottles, cans, snack food wrappings, cigarette packages, and discarded lives and respect lay on the ground in heartbreaking testimony to a changing relationship with a beautiful landscape. It breaks my heart. They know not what they do. Fortunately though, and perhaps as a sign of hope, the teens seem to leave the rest of the creek undamaged. It seems they do not realize that as citizens of the town they are stewards of this shared land, especially the section they seem to claim as their own. They don’t seem to feel a connection. Sometimes I have passed a couple of teens here, who I must say politely let me pass while they smoke weed without so much as a blink of the eye and I can’t help but notice the trash all about them. They are destroying themselves, while believing they are making a stand about freedom. Maybe the connection they do not seem to feel is really more obvious. Maybe there is an obvious link between the absence of cherishing the earth and the absence of cherishing their own health. Maybe, unbeknownst to them they are making a statement, albeit very different from the one they believe they are making.

Although, my own boys did not bond with the creek as I had hoped, they have experienced an intimate tie with another piece of land, their grandmother’s large yard. The yard will one day be a parking lot or a perhaps a WalMart. Their grandmother lived on this land for sixty years and she cherished it. Time took its toll though and where once there was nothing but a dirt path there is now a four lane highway and commercial buildings all around her land. The land no longer has the capacity to blot out the development all around it. Yet, in my mind I see my brother-in-law, then I see the grass hidden under quilts of snow. Richard pulls the twins, still babies, on the antique sleigh he found at an auction. He has put his own work socks on the twins’ hands and half way up their arms, which we all, young and old, find wildly funny. The blades of the old sleigh carve out a river through glaciers over grass buried so far down that it is a shock to think of it coming back to life each year for the boys to run on. I can almost see small tufts of grass poking through the cracks of future asphalt. Grass has an amazing capacity for survival. Perhaps we do too, if we concentrate our efforts and tilt our ears towards the earth to listen.