I burned down a barn once. My thoughts compared it to breaking the champagne glass after a toast....
It was over 20 years ago. I remember the heat of the flames and how it had melted the siding on the house downwind.
I felt bad for them, but knew insurance would cover them. Today the house is very nice.
The foundation at the rise of the hill remains. I stood there. The creek at the bottom now a dirty irrigation trench. The water flow (where had that come from....?) was gone or just to a trickle. Maybe because it was early October and it was a dry summer.
The memories of ice skating below the road, where that "itty bitty creek" met with "Otter Creek" and pooled in the small tunnel.
Digging up clay on the banks of the Otter Creek, letting it dry in the sun... Watching the craw-daddies and tadpoles, creating lagoons for one or the other. The frogs and whatever else thrived along that creek paid me no mind.
We would put in at Grasshopper Bridge, 3 or 4 of us with our various floatables.... actual farm tracker inner tubes, rafts roped together with willow vines, always with sticks to navigate and scare away the turtles. There were only a few rough spots and a few portages but it was an adventure and I play it over in my mind. The gooseberries and mulberries, the leaches and the mosquitoes, the minnows and catfish...the "Nature Trail" - remnants of a train track that had put this small town on the map some 100 odd years previously.
I miss the town, the 'village' the nature vs small town.
Regrets of only not going out more, exploring more, living in the wild more...
The abuse that raged in the background fades when I think of that creek and the rocks so many different kinds, the mysterious clay, and all trees I climbed or wild flowers I stared at for long moments.
