Excerpt from After the Floods: Minnesota Childhood

Cover Image by Carla Stetson

by Bruce Henricksen

     This passage is from my novel, After the Floods, a story of a town's recovery from disaster.

     Out by the swimming hole, a wooded hill bulged 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 splashed about in the creek, sending the frogs and shiners scurrying amid pulsing blotches 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 the thread you had pulled from your sweater the other day. Once, when it was only two of us 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. It was almost something from the Oz book my mother had read to me. We didn't know then that they were our best days flowing away.
     And we might talk, Lyle and I, 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 insects or 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 Nana's 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 thin pieces--the cookies Nana brought to the lawn in the evening, the rhubarb you stole from a neighbor's garden, 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's what all stories are about, the ripples moving away down some vast river, and the words we find to describe those moments, they are in the river too, swirling together and then apart.