along the Queset

Summer Days at Queset Brook

Summers were long and hot, but the heat never seemed unbearable. Maybe as a child, such things had no bearing on my simple life. I played hard day in, day out - running barefoot without a care in the world. Many days, I spent along the bank of the brook that ran through the woods just north of our house. Despite it being barely 8 feet from one bank to the other, when I looked at it, it was a mile wide and as mighty as the Mississippi as it flowed over rock and downed trees waiting for my imagination to conquer it.

I competed with sun turtles for a place to sit as warm rays made their way through the leafy overhang that surrounded my summer hideout. There I'd sit - a line in the water, a worm on the end of my hook, a fish waiting to be caught and when it happened, the thrill was never the same.

I practiced 'catch and release' long before it became a term of modern day fishermen. Only by returning the fish to the stream that was their life source, would I continue to enjoy bringing them to the surface of a world they saw only through mirrored waters.

Not many summer days went by that my feet didn't dangle in the cool, passing water. I often wondered if others knew the feelings I held within me as I sat listening to the birds sing from the branches above, darting back and forth across the blue patches of sky, which played as a backdrop against the heavy mass of trees. Did all the world feel as I did? Innocent and free? The smell of clean air, of lilacs in bloom... the smell of green life on a summer's day?

I often wondered if it was how Mark Twain felt as he wrote of his youthful adventures. Or maybe it was I who felt as he once had - a child playing along the shores of a river, poling across it on a raft of logs held together by an imagination running wild and free.

The memories of those days are as clear as the brook once was and as close as a thought, whispering on the wind.