Don't Go Down To The Creek!
I've written before about how much fun my cousins and I would have playing down at the creek that flowed behind our houses out in the country. It didn't matter the time of year. We were always down there. I've written about the rafts our uncle made us out of telephone poles and how we'd go all over that creek pretending this or that. It was called Sucker Creek for a reason-there were blood suckers in it but it never kept us away. We just never swam in the murky water. In the winter we'd skate for hours-even at night under the moonlight. But it was one Saturday morning, as the hint of spring was in the air while snow was still covering the ground and the ice was still intact, that will forever remain my most poignant memory of those days down at the creek. My mother asked me to watch my sister-who is seven years younger than me-as out the front door we went to play. I must have been around eleven years old at the time. Her last instructions were firm, "Don...