Oh Brothers, Let’s Go Down

There is a bridge, you’d miss it if you blinked, on the way to Nana’s house.

We never blink.

We wait for it.

“It’s coming, Mama!”

“Daddy, do you see it?”

When we cross it, we crane our necks to see how high, or how low the river might be today. You never can tell, with this rain and then this heat.

We always say that someday, we’ll stop, and we’ll have an up close look at that river, but as with many of the things that we always tell ourselves we’ll get ’round to, we don’t.

Then, one day, we wake up, and we decide that today, today we will make time to stop.

And when we do, we find that magic happens.

We walk where dinosaurs once tread.

Only a few yards away there are real dino tracks!

We build a monument of river rocks, not so very far from where Spanish settlers built their missions.

We swim, in perhaps the same spot where AWOL Union soldiers bathed and prayed at night to avoid the Texas Rangers another day.

We cast our nets, hoping to catch one of the beautiful young bass, where Tonkawa boys, in ages past, did the same to help feed their families.

We cooled our toes, and then our crackling bodies in the cold water, and like so many before us, saw the signs of summer’s waning.

Rivers do not stop. Time does not stop. But on occasion, people should.

(For the soundtrack, visit here.)