It is raining...I hear the drips through the thin-plate glass panels of my windows. The rain is a mist at this point, and the birds have come out and are chatting to each other. The air conditioner kicks on...it is right under my window, so I hear its rumble. There are actually 2 units - one downstairs and one upstairs, and they flow at different paces. Whenever I hear the rain I am taken back to a time when we lived in Lewisburg, TN. We used to have a creek, and it stretched all the way from our pond at one end of the property, to the street at the other end. The pond poured into it from a small hole in the side of its bank, and thus began the water's journey - first past the dog fence, and then the chicken fence, which were both connected to the white outbuilding (the white outbuilding having 3 separate sections in a row), then past the poor little Boxelder tree that never seemed to grow any taller, then past the Red Barn (which wasn't really a barn, but we called it that). There was a stretch of pure wooded area just beyond the red barn and it was thick and dense with trees and underbrush, and a little rock table that had a hole in one side that worked beautifully as a cup-holder. But Christa and I stomped and broke out a path just to the right of the creek, and this path stretched all the way down to the fat black locust tree where we burried Milo and Eco. Before this point, the creek was running as quickly as it could towards the far side of the property over to Mr. Rutledge's property. But at this stubby locust tree, it suddenly pooled and became deep and swirly, and then took a rushing leap to the left, as slick as you like, and headed straight for the road! There was something so alluring about The Road, not only to this silly spluttering creek, but also to our animals. Maybe it was a gravitational pull? They all seemed to think that was the 'Way to Freedom'. I don't know why they did not run the opposit direction and into the woods? But, again, there was something alluring that I think we humans did not understand...even the creek rushed towards it.
As it rushed, the creek passed a line of hedgeapple trees (p.s. those things are a pain when you are mowing...riding along and every few feet you have to: disengadge the mower so it wouldn't stall out, dismount because there were hidden hedgeapples in the tall grass, gather all the apples you found in that area, mount up, engadge, and put the dern mower back into 1st gear, then work your way back up to 3rd). This is the yard we called TENNESSEE because it was shaped like the state...only backwards. Christa noticed it one day, and it just kind of stuck. Mixed into the hedgeapple trees were honeysuckle vines and lots of other vines that liked to reach out and grab your clothes and arms and legs with their spikes. Just outside of the tree line was a small Sycamore tree. This one we were never able to climb, but it was a cute little tree. It grew straight and tall, sticking its top branches as high into the air as it could - and it always looked like it was trying hard to be as tall as its brother Sycamore down the way a bit. The taller one was the one we always climbed, and it was a fantastic climbing tree! I tried to climb the smaller one, but it was just too small. Anyway, the big Sycamore was at the end of the property line, and thus the last we ever saw of the creek. It hopped the fence at the edge of the property and joined the other creek that flowed parallel to the road - like ol' Bess who joined the Brumbies.
'The one thing necessary is a true interior and spiritual life, true growth, on my own, in depth in a new direction.' Thomas Merton
