Zoom Willow

A young willow tree is bright against the pines behind it, a flame of colour. Watch out! The ticks are out, lurking in the tall grass. A few tatty cat-tails are trapped against the berm of the road. Sometimes they puff out as white as any dandylion. Not these.

The pond behind me drains into a bog and then into what we called ‘Hazle’s Swamp, a pond snipped off from a tiny oxbow of the river just above the Rapids. The 2 block road along the oxbow is still dirt, a favorite for bicyclists avoiding the climb over the river bank. Two geese often visit the pond now, and graze along the roadside.

The place has been sculpted nicely into ponds and bridges for a private park in-behind a trailer park that was once on the outskirts of town, but now has pulled up and left, faced with fast food neighbors and presumably rising rent.

Or maybe it was ‘Fable Land’ that made the park. Their 15 ft statue of an Indian Brave holding a tomahawk got pulled down by the neighbor kids years ago, and ‘Fable Land’ (Feed the Deer!!) itself has long faded away.