The Path of Water
When I was ten my mother bought a house in a subdivision surrounded by farmland with pockets of woods on either side of an old creek. As kids we occasionally followed the little creek down south past the sledding hill we called Powerline, as if it were a city, to the area called Bamboo Farmhouse—a grove of bamboo near an abandoned wreck of a farmhouse.
The second story of the house collapsed into the kitchen cabinets and you couldn’t go upstairs, but the dark dining room and kitchen with a missing wall made for excellent exploring. I’d rummage through the broken teacups and rusty spoons and other kitchen utensils scattered over the rotted linoleum covered in dirt and weeds and broken glass. The creek went around the farmhouse and its rusted-out appliances in the weedy front yard. Somehow we never got any farther than the farmhouse, maybe because it took so long to get there.
We were careful rummaging through that old house because we knew the roof could crumble further and break all our legs. If any of us got hurt it was a long way back to run alone. There wasn’t a road to speak of anywhere near that farmhouse that I knew of.
I didn’t know the name of the creek in my backyard until I was a middle-aged woman living 3,000 miles away from the woods and the little creek I knew growing up.
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