So we mow regularly. We keep an eye on certain familiar places in the fields and pastures. We do what we can to keep our area and our people safe.
Today, as I was driving my grandfather's tractor around fields and pastures, thinking about how I'd explain where I'd mowed, I thought, "Oh, I'll just tell them I mowed down by the creek where we played when we were kids," or, "by the hog shed," or, "along the old road." Sounds simple enough, until you realize that "we" encompasses four solid generations. We didn't play there at the same time; most of us have never lived there, but we were most certainly there together.
We saw our cousins there together, waded there together, walked there together, grew up there together. In all of our lives, those rushing waters, those rolling hills, those red barns, those solitary havens, have been the one common constant.
Some of us remember a basketball hoop by gas tanks, a pond raft floating on oil drums, and a silo glimpsed at the outer stretches of a swing's arc, while others remember jewel weed and mulberry trees in the ditch, a tire swing on a hillside, and patches of lawn worn bare by frequent baseball games.
Because of who and how we are, most of us have worked there and all of us have played there.
Every one of us has known love there.
And that love--the shared, enduring love for the people and the place--is what links our many generations and buoys us as dangerously high waters threaten to wash us out and away.
Fighting the water is futile; it will go where it chooses--where it was meant to go--and it will go when the time is right. No, we can't fight the water or coerce the water. We can only keep the paths safe, flag known dangers, and keep protecting the people and places we love.
The river will win; we will do what we can.
