Excerpt from After the Floods: Minnesota Childhood

Cover Image by Carla Stetson

by Bruce Henricksen

     Out by the swimming hole a wooded hill rose in the distance, and we always talked about going there one day, trekking through fields under hobo clouds that rode the west wind. But we only thrashed about in the creek, sending the frogs and shiners scurrying beneath splashes of sunlight, and then we sat on the bank, our flesh turned to Braille by the icy water.
     You'd warm slowly as the sun reached through the trees to fling gold coins on the creek and the birds carried on their endless discussions in the branches. Perhaps a garden snake would slip through the grass beside you like a thread pulled from a sweater. Once, when it was only Lyle and I at the swimming hole, a butterfly floated by on a leaf that had curled up at the edges like a hand holding its delicate rider, escaped, perhaps, from the Land of Oz. We didn't know then that they were our best days flowing on.
     And we might talk about the future--about what we thought it would be. Years later, Lyle died in Vietnam. I found his name on the memorial, and others I'd known too, when I went to Washington a few years ago, the names of boys who swim in creeks in no one's memory now, all these decades down the river.
     I miss those old days. I'm not saying change is bad, although some of it is. I remember my first home, though, on summer evenings when a thousand old moments come up out of the fields like seeds to blow across the lawn of my present home. There were trees then where it's only buildings now, trees that would turn and swell in the wind after a rain. We were at the edge of town, and out behind the garden we kept a field with horses. Nothing is prettier in the morning than horses in a field.
     It is odd, the things that memory brings back in its partial way, a world in small pieces--a plate of cookies on the lawn in the evening, apples from the trees in the backyard, the day you got The Wizard of Oz. You just remember a few of the ripples, not the whole river. I don't know any writers, but I think that stories are ripples moving away down some vast river, and the words we find to describe our world, they are in the river too, swirling together and then apart.