The Reindeer Keeper

This is the only old photo I have that shows any inkling of where the creek that ran behind my grandparents' farmhouse was located. If you look beyond my older brother, the toddler in the photo, and my grandfather passing by on his tractor, a hint of  that creek can be seen beyond that overgrown field.  When my cousins and I were growing up that creek, known as Sucker Creek for a reason, turned into a marvelous place to play no matter the season. We'd build hideaways along its banks out of the brush growing wild. We'd skate on it in the wintertime, even in the evenings. One of our uncles built us rafts out of telephone poles so using steel poles as steering devices, we'd travel about that creek on one adventure after another. And in the summertime before the creek dried up, we'd go fishing although looking back, I can't ever remember seeing a single fish swimming in that murky water. But then, it wasn't the normal kind of fishing and we were just kids having

 When it got to be that time of the year, when winter was thinking of fading into spring, my cousins and I gave Mother Nature a hand in the process as it seemed pretty slow to us. Because we spent lots of time outside anytime of the year-lots of time in the fields and pastures, whether attempting to feed my older brother's black angus as pictured above or running through hayfields or running to our clubhouse or down to the creek, when the thought of spring was in the air, we pitched in to help that happen even faster than Mother Nature had planned on making it happen. Sometimes we'd start in the driveways. We'd go into my aunt's garage and bring out whatever we could find to chop through the ice and shovel the remaining snow away. Guess we thought we'd then be able to ride our bikes. Whatever we thought we'd be out there working hard with shovels and hoes. Part of the fun was etching little streams out in the melting snow, leading that water to a bigger pool of