When I was a boy, I spent about two years of my childhood living a stone's throw from the Mississippi River in an old cabin. It was a rattletrap of a place, tottering on poles to keep it from being swept away with the spring floods. My parents had come on hard times and what had once been a weekend retreat had become our new home. I didn't know how bad things were at the time. I just thought it had been someone's brilliant idea--moving a family of seven into what amounted to, a one room shack with partitions for walls. You couldn't even drink the water out of the faucets--and although I can't remember from where we tapped it, we had to import our drinking water in old milk jugs and haul them up the steps in those plastic milk crates. We were fortunate enough to have electricity but no furnace, so we had to use a homemade wood stove for heat which sat on cinder blocks in the middle of our kitchen. It seemed like we were always out in the woods cutting firewood and dragging it back home.
One spring, the river had come within inches of the bottom of the cabin. We had to use a paddle boat to reach the levy where dad's truck was parked or to catch the school bus in the morning. I guess the whole family could have been swept away in the middle of the night while we slept had the river rose just a little bit more, or I suppose that old wood stove could have caught fire to the cabin. But I don't think I've ever felt as safe and secure and sound as I did back then.
The older I get, the more I revisit those days I spent along the muddy Mississippi. Sometimes I think I'd like to take my daughters there and show them where their daddy learned to skip stones and swim, where I fished and explored--where I learned to dream. But even if that old cabin was still there, it wouldn't be the same. Those sweltering summer nights, a cacophony of trilling insects and croaking frogs. Those misty autumn mornings traipsing through fallen leaves and the bitter winter nights with skies so clear you could almost see the edge of heaven...almost. I can still smell the river thawing from its long freeze and giving way to spring. You can't show someone those things, they have to be lived, felt. That's who I am.
I'm a husband, I'm a father. I cook, I clean, I mend. I bandage, I soothe, I love and I protect. Who am I to write? Who am I not to write. If you want to learn something about yourself, pick up a pen and put it to paper. Who are you?
