JOY ALONG THE WAY: SMALL VICTORIES LAST FOR LIFE

"Listen!" my sister, Lou, said, pushing back the bed covers and holding up a hushing hand.

I listened. All I heard was the early morning farm sounds.

"Hear it?" Lou demanded

I sat up, shaking the sleepiness away and listened more intently. "It's the waterfall!"

Early springtime we kept an ear attuned to hear the first splashing roar of the water as it fell over a rock shelf in the nearby creek.

We dressed hurriedly, did our Saturday morning chores and dashed off not to the waterfall, but to the wet weather spring we knew would be running when we heard the waterfall. It was up a wooded hillside not far above the creek. We had found it several years ago and had had great fun with it, pulling out the accumulation of winter debris to make the water clear and direct it any way downhill we wanted it to go by digging little channels. We kept an old trowel there year-round for that purpose.

That morning when we had the spring running free and clear, we cupped our hands and drank long and satisfying from the cool, clean water.

Soon we could see the water running down the little channel we had made for it to go the previous season. Fiddlehead ferns and wild columbines dipped and swayed gracefully along the narrow banks.

"Let's make a reservoir," Lou suggested.

"What's a reservoir?" I asked, stumbling over the pronunciation. Lou was ahead of me in grade school and thus in vocabulary. And, for that matter, everything else. She was always the one coming up with new and fascinating ideas. I loved Lou dearly but wished that, for once, I could be the one to think of something new and interesting. Some days I wondered wearily if I would ever come up with different and worthwhile ideas. Was I doomed to be just a dull follower all my life?

"It's where you store up water and then let some of it go out through a narrow opening," Lou explained. "It comes out with such force that, if the reservoir is big enough it can turn big wheels, make electricity. Get some rocks and pebbles. I'll show you."

I, a lowly carrier of rocks, diligently collected them, dilly-dallying in order to get pretty ones that Lou might admire and say so. She put them together in a very intricate way so that the bubbling-up spring water did back up, forming a pool.

I tossed into the little pool some crushed mint I had gathered as I was hunting for the pretty rocks.

"What's that?" Lou demanded, brows knitted.

"Mint," I told her. "You know where it grows up there along the creek."

Lou again cupped her hands and took a drink of the now flavored water. "Heh, kid," she said. "That's good. That's very good. I'd never have thought of that."

I was so puffed up with the compliment and the thought I had, at last, done something Lou had never thought of, I sat by the spring long after Lou had gone down the hill and across the creek to do something else new.

I picked up the old rusty trowel and began digging a new channel for the overflowing water to go. It splashed over little hummocks, around a lichen covered rock, trickled past a wild pansy. I felt a little wild myself, so full of power that I could make this water go anywhere downhill I wanted it to.

Eventually I, too, went on down hill to do something else new and unexplored.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.