Deer Creek

A black-and-white photo of Deer Creek hung on our living room wall when I was growing up. It was a picture of an anonymous waterway (so why do I know that it was Deer Creek?) with thick banks of trees on either side overhanging the creek. I don't know why we had the picture, or who took it. Certainly no one in our family took artsy nature photographs. And yet there it was, from my earliest memories: Deer Creek on our wall. Was either of my parents particularly attached to Deer Creek? Not to my knowledge (though I have to point out that there were many things they never bothered to reveal to us). Neither of my parents was a fishing fanatic. They ate fish but they didn't fish. Like most people in our town, both of them loved those small local catfish rolled in cornmeal and deep fried to a fish-y crispness, so that even the wafer-thin tail was delicious.

 

But water? Or banks of greenery? Nature in general? Nothing. If it was any less manicured than a golf course, Nature held no interest for them.

 

Of course, all of my knowledge of them comes from the years after they began having children. Once they found the on-button for that procedure, they seemed unable to figure out how to turn it off, and that made them much too busy to be floating down Deer Creek in a canoe, taking pictures.

 

So perhaps our black-and-white picture was a reminder of earlier romps in the woods, of old swimmin' holes, of the free play of their before-family lives.

 

It's not easy to discover our parents' secrets.

 

Copyright 2010 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca