Childhood memories...

This leaf was trying to float in the small amount of water in the stream that the covered bridge below spans. The second photo is the original...I was trying to make the water look more like what I remembered but then the leave has exaggerated contrasts. So try to picture something in between the two images and you will come nearer seeing what I seen.
This is the Marshall Bridge in Parke Country, Indiana. One of the shorter bridges--56 ft in length.
When we were kids, we had Gap Creek that bordered our farm in Tennessee. Every summer, well, it wasn't actually every summer, but at least 2 or 3 summers or possibly 4...my nephew that is the same age as me came down and spent the summers with us in Tennessee.

In my memories, we played in that creek every single day of the week, except maybe if it stormed and flooded. We turned over rocks in search of crawdads, hunted for fresh water mussels....not to eat or anything like that. It was just fun to search for them...and we did sometimes move them from their sandy spot in the water to a spot of our choosing...I don't really remember if they ever stayed or not.

I may have told about this before...so forgive me if I am boring you. These are just some of the happiest memories I have. I don't really remember our age, but we had to be up around 10 years old I think...just going by some of the other things we did.

On the other side of the creek a huge sycamore tree had been uprooted, I assume during a storm. It lay out over the neighbor's pasture--his cattle could walk under it with ease. The tree itself was so big around that we could neither have put our arms around it. Anyway, he and I would take such things as mustard and onion sandwiches and get out on it and sit and watch the cows and laugh and talk.

I don't remember if I had chores back then or what they were if I did....yet I can't imagine not having something I was responsible for. I know one thing I had to do and that was wash the supper dishes...mommy did the morning dishes, we both worked on the dinner dishes. (We always called lunch dinner, and the evening meal was always supper.) But other than that, I don't know what else I did.

Anyway, any time I am at a creek, it immediately brings to mind my childhood....or that of our own daughters. We don't have much of a creek near us, but there was a few years when they were kids that we went fishing quite often at Bridgeton and Mansfield. Roger and I fished, and they fished some, but they played more as we waded.

When we were doing that, we always got one of the hard plastic kiddie pools and kept in our backyard each summer, and they would bring home their treasures...crawdads, pumpkin seed bluegill, tadpoles, and some kind of bug that I can't remember the name of right now. But it was a water bug. I feel like I am forgetting something else but for the life of me I can't think what it would be. Now, neither of them have much time to enjoy the outdoors, but both still love it.