JOY ALONG THE WAY: FILLING UP SENSES AT CREEKSIDE

The eastern pre-dawn horizon showed gold through the filigree of green leaves. The sky was cloudless. Robins were announcing the arrival of a new day. This, I said to myself, will be a great morning to go down to the creekside and fill up my senses as John Denver would say.

I could hear the splashing of the water over the limestone shelf before I could see it. Due to recent rains there was swift water flowing and the general splash, swirl, murmur were at their best.

As usual, I broke off a weed twig, threw it into the water and followed its course as far as I could see. Would it get banked at the first bend or go all the way down the rock-walled creek to the Mississippi, then on past the cement plant, Commerce, Memphis, to gain the great ocean? How many months? Could the twig hold up?

I wanted to get right down to the water and feel the force of it with my hands, but the muddy banks are slippery and steep. Once down, how would I get back up?

The creek has widened much over the past two years due to bank cave-ins. A big drainage pipe, the end of which one could barely see in former years now sticks out over the water by about six or eight feet. But nature always comes and tries to heal. Here and there a lacy fringe of little lavender flowers with ferny leaves has come to hide the muddy scars. Belongs to the vetch family, I believe. Also, milkweed has come. There are little patches of it here and there. Milkweed spreads readily. Soon the Monarch butterflies will have more and more places to lay their eggs. There was sour dock and wild lettuce already going to seed to insure next year's crop and way downstream where the white bank rocks stop, there are handsome elderberry bushes in bloom. Miniature forests of box elders are springing up. Will they survive to hold the bank in place or get mowed down or die in a cave-in?

There is so much life along the creekbank. Already crickets are singing. Redwings and killdeers fly low and add sound to the green landscape. The silvery glee of the meadowlarks rings loud and clear. Purple martins fly high to reap their breakfasts and snatch a few flying insects to take home to their kids.

Two brownish butterflies alight on the lavender flowers across the stream, too far away for proper identification but I think they were fritillaries.

There have been furry creatures there in the night. Their tracks in the muddy places are easily discernible -- coons, possums, and see here, there is the track of a child, one not scared of steep, muddy banks. Farther upstream, in a wooded area, I learn that some little red foxes have been sighted. Wish they'd come on down for me to see.

No sight of the Troll, though, who leaves his tracks only in the imagination. All I see of him is where he might be. Look at that Queen Anne's lace over on the other side. See how it wiggles when all else is still. The Troll has bumped into it. I track his journey down the bank. What made that barn swallow dip so low and flare up again? Did it see something mysterious? And the crickets over there have suddenly hushed as crickets do when something is passing by.

For those who can't "see" the trail of the Troll as he travels up and down the creek in search of his lost bridge, or mentally trace a broken twig all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, the creek is just a steep, muddy-banked stream bordered by stinging weeds and fly-about mosquitoes. It takes nature and "strange eyesight" to "decorate" some ordinary, not especially scenic places.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.