There’s this creek by my grandparents’ old house that we used to go to every day as kids. And I went there again yesterday, after a few years of avoiding it. I had to take a new route, because I didn’t want to walk by the house, knowing I wouldn’t see my grandpa standing by the window, my grandma sitting on the couch. When we’d go to the skating rink in elementary school we used to walk by, and they’d always wave. So I took the back route instead.
A jack pine used to mark the path down into the forest, slouched like some strange tired creature, the cones curved and grey and good for kicking down the pavement. The jack pine was still there, but the path was gone. If I hadn’t walked that trail every day, gone sledding down the steep slope of it, I would never have known it existed at all. I stood on the edge of where it had been, next to the old twisted tree that was just as I remembered, and looked down towards the creek. I could hear the water run, but I couldn’t see it.
Tall and impenetrable, a copse of spruces reached up from the dirty snow to the cold blue sky, young and green, a wall made branch by branch, day by quiet day. We were the ones who had planted those trees, years back, and my grandpa had told us to place them further apart but we hadn’t listened, because we’d wanted to kneel side-by-side as we dug. We tied orange ribbons around the base of them when we’d finished, so we could point out which were ours when we returned. I couldn’t reach the trees, and the ribbons were probably long buried, and the creek we’d walked to every day lay rushing and just beyond my sight. There were tall grasses along the bank of it, I knew, and maybe they were still weighed down with snow or maybe they lay dry and brown and waiting or maybe the high water was lapping at the blanket of them, high enough my grandpa would have told us to stand back more.
There was something there, to the fact that we’d planted those trees that destroyed the trail, that I was alone that day looking at the wall we’d planted together, grown up like we were, and that he wasn’t there to laugh at how closely packed they were now, just like he’d warned, and that they stood bright and imposing and blocking the bank where he’d stood in the summer heat as we swam, hair white and glittering, and that they looked back at me now and seemed to say, Look what’s become of the lot of us.
I took the back way home again, and there were empty coffee cups scattered across the treeline, and he’d used to carry a bag as we walked to collect the garbage, and it feels a bit like it’s died with them, I think. The creek winds all through town, all the way back to that other home, to the place that’s still mine but not the place I learned to ride a bike, but the grasses are only there, and I couldn’t get to them.
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