These hot summer days remind me of when I was young, Leo’s age in fact, riding bike through the humid air on the farm where we lived. My friend and I swept down the pockmarked driveway, past the fruit trees and the cows, their tails swishing side to side, across the narrow back road and into the church parking lot. Around and around we rode our bikes, then through the graveyard and back to the church again, paying no attention to the somber people standing beside the graves.
Ditching our bikes, we clambered down the forest bank to the Pequea Creek, fishing or telling stories or searching for snappers. The water ran and ran and never looked back.
I wonder where that water is now, that very water we watched bubbling over rocks and spinning in tiny vortices around our ankles. Is it in the Atlantic Ocean? Or locked in ice in some far northern place? Or in a cloud over Sri Lanka?
Or has that water made its way back again to me, to the Millstream where I live now, where my son Leo wades and the minnows dash away and the tadpoles gather in black specks? Do I drink it from my tap, those same molecules that rushed by me almost 40 years ago?
How much of life returns to us, and we never even recognize it?