June 10, 1997
1:56PM EST

Monday kind of swung up and down.

I wound up being stuck in the house most of the day, with a stack of laundry the size of Texas. Late in the afternoon, my frustration at the amount of housework I had to do, coupled with my inability to leave the apartment reached a head and I tromped off into the sunset to take a walk in the park. It had been such a beautiful day, and I wasted it indoors, so I was desperate to catch those last few rays of sunshine.

I didn't want to be in a bad mood when sabs got home, because I knew I'd start nagging at him about how much of a mess he'd left out and whatnot. So I left, and went and walked it all off in the coolness of the stream in the park back behind the trees under a canopy of green speckled with golden sinking sunlight.

I seem to have had a fascination with streams for a significant portion of my life. As a kid, I used to put on my boots and go trekking up the stream that was out across the back yards. It was an adventure, down among the wild plants, the rushing water, the tumbled rocks. Similarly, I was fascinated with the water life in the Brandywine River both times we canoed down it. And as a junior in high school I took Bio II a course which was centered around a stream study. I seem to delight in tramping through water, observing the life around it. At the end of my junior year abroad, when my world suddenly turned upside-down, I used to walk down to the river just below the residence and scramble along the banks for a few hours, getting my shoes all muddy, my skirt wet and my hands torn on brambles.

The stream in Bren Mar Park, is unfortunately, filled with trash, and is very low right now. However, the rocks are still beautifully shaped, little fishes swim in the deeper parts and skater-bugs skim along the surface trolling for a meal, deer tracks speckle the wet sand at its edges along with raccoon and something larger that looked like a badger's prints shuffling down to the water's edge.

I took off my shoes and waded through the cool water, following it as stealthily as possible back up towards it's source. For a moment I wasn't a half-Irish immigrant child of the technology age, but a wild Celt-woman tracking a fish in the narrows.

Every now and then this need to get back into the wildness of nature seizes me. Especially when my feelings are in turmoil. Somehow the light slanting through green leaves, the smell of the earth and the water, of rotting leaves and the crackling of wild things in the brush manage to calm my soul and give me a few moments of peace so that I can turn back and face the screaming voices of the modern world.

I don't think I'd ever survive in the wilder times of my ancestors when truly wild things still roamed the wilderness, but there is something in me which hankers after trees and grass and bracken and water flowing freely over stones.

I wish I had a picture of the stream to put up here ... maybe I'll bring my camera down there later today and snap a shot to put up later ....