The Creek Behind My Farm
The water waiting
So now you know what I was carrying in my good blue dress the morning I walked down that bank to let them name the water.
I expected a little gathering. A sign, a few folks from the park board, maybe some of the mothers I knew, a plate of bars and some lemonade on Harold’s bench, and the mayor saying some words I would have to stand through before I could go home and be by myself with it, the way I am always by myself with it.
That is not what I found.
I came through the pasture gate and down the worn path through the cottonwoods, and when the water came into view through the trees I stopped so sudden I nearly went down on the path.
The creek was full of people. Not on the bank. In the water. Standing waist-deep in my bend, in their clothes, in the cold morning water, hundreds of them, more people than I knew lived in the whole township, filling that pool from the gravel bar clear across to the limestone rock, so many of them the water was moving with it, all of them turned to face the bank, all of them waiting, and every last one of them gone still and quiet the moment I came out of the trees.
I knew the faces. That is the thing that put me on my knees, right there in the grass, before anybody could get to me. I knew them. There was Marcus Reedy, gray at the temples now, standing in the water with his own grandchildren beside him. There was Katie Sorenson. There was Dana Kessler the nurse, up to her waist in the creek she went into that work because of. There was Birdie Dittmer, who had made the sign, standing out in the deep part where it took her a whole summer to go, holding it steady.
The mayor with his cowlick grown out and gone to gray. The boy with the bicycle, I thought for one wild second, before I remembered he had moved away sixty years ago and this was some other old man’s face. Children I taught in the eighties holding the hands of children I taught last summer. Four hundred people, maybe more, who had one thing in common in all the world, which was that a long time ago a woman in a straw hat stood in this exact water and taught them it would hold them up.
They had not come to watch me name the water. They had gotten into the water. They were waiting for me in it, the way I had waited in it for every one of them.