It rained last night. That's an understatement. It poured, and lightening flashed and thunder roared. This morning the creek is up over the bridge. It's a good twenty or thirty feet up the road on either side and the force moves boulder and tree trunks. There is one on the bridge that will take a tractor to move.
The water flows, thick and creamy like milk chocolate, and creates a back wave as it leaves the far side of the bridge. Watching, it's hard to believe the creek will be calm, clear and blue-green again. There's a three foot high sapling that is almost under water. It appeared last summer after a storm and I am almost sure it is what I called as a child, a powder puff tree. I love it for my childhood memories and I don't care that it's a "trash tree." It has an orange ribbon tied around it in an attempt to protect it from the men and their tractors. That blaze of orange is just visible over the milk chocolate waters. It bends with the force but it's still there. I often wonder about it's story and how it came to be rooted exactly there, a gift from the chaos of a summer storm.
When David was sick I identified deeply with this creek; how the landscape of it, like our lives, changed regularly. Normal for a creek is a fluid thing. For a time it is clear and green and I can see into the deep spots, then it floods and it's hard to believe it will ever have that calm beauty again. But it does. There is a new boulder, a new sapling, a sandbar where there wasn't one, but the creek settles into this new landscape with it's old beauty shining through.
Isn't life just like that?
I am graced with our farm creek to remind me when fear, chaos, and upheaval sweep through my life: normal changes, but the essence stays the same. Water returns to it's state of Grace every single time.
Isn't life just like that?
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