Falling asleep I remembered something from my childhood, a small bit of geography.
Our house was built in 1964, 3 years before I was born. The house sat on a large lot, not huge but by today’s standards it was large. It had three bedrooms, a finished basement and a patio door onto a patio, not deck, a patio.
my very small big brother stands on our front yard
The particular piece of geography or rather topography was a depression, one that ran from the south east corner of the front yard in a diagonal across the lawn. It didn’t cut the lawn in half, but rather divided it into two unequal parts. The depression started just behind a Mountain ash and bent around the base of the tree as it made its way toward the road. It curved slightly again, in the direction of our neighbour’s driveway, but continued more or less on its path toward the road. It petered out before it ever reached the curb.
During most of the year, this slightly meandering, longer than wide depression went unnoticed. In the summer it provided a mild distraction while mowing the lawn. In the autumn, you noticed it while raking the leaves of the Mountain Ash, and its neighbour the Norway maple. During the winter the snow drifts might reveal that the ground underneath wasn’t completely flat, but you would need to know what you were looking for.
In the spring this depression became something wonderful, at least to me. Every spring as the snow melted, water would gather in the this smallest of valleys. A tiny, temporary stream mere feet from our family room window. The sight of this pleased me and captured my young imagination. I secretly loved this little body of water, no matter how fleeting and it made my yard and house feel special.
Somewhere along the way, someone (I imagine it was my father because I can’t imagine anyone else telling me this) told me that the mini valley likely reflected a real stream that now flowed underground. Imagine that! An underground stream. Seems that babbling brooks had no business cluttering up the landscape of our suburban neighbourhood and the developer had “buried” the stream before our house was built.
This knowledge made me love the little dip in our yard even more. A stream running underground toward the river that existed a mile or so away.
I may have bragged to my friends about the little stream that was and wasn’t, but I don’t recall. I don’t recall talking to anyone about it after learning the underground secret. I vaguely remember a makeshift bridge made from a toboggan, but I can’t be sure about that.
I think about the same time that I learned about the buried stream, I also learned that our neighbourhood, on the northerly ridge of a large ravine, had been an apple orchard before the houses were built. Streams and apple trees. Little roads where trucks laden with apples made their way. In the centre of our next door neighbour’s backyard there was a large apple tree. I guess it was spared the chainsaw when the orchard became the place where I grew up, its location must have pleased someone, so it stood. I never knew it to bear anything but small wormy apples, useful for throwing and attracting yellow jackets in the autumn.
My mother lives somewhere else now. Not far from the house with the little buried stream she lives in a new condo. Behind her condo is a real stream, with real bridges, water that flows, reeds and fish.
I live far from my mother and my old house. I visit her, and think I should pop by the old house and look at it. For some reason I rarely do. When I do, I never stop the car, just slow down and look. Next time I should get out of the car and walk over to the little depression, maybe stand in it and think about what was before and what came after.
Happiness.
