Swollen With Winter
I had a reoccurring dream as a child: I come upon a rushing stream in a sunny clearing while walking up through an unfamiliar forest glade. The clear water flows vigorously over tall grass, bent and swaying. I feel a rush of joy mingled with an unnamed longing.
I encountered that dream stream vividly during a summer camp job in Ligonier, PA.
I had taken a walk with a fellow counselor who was a new acquaintance. We ventured beyond the playing fields behind the lodge, into the woods, and beyond what we assumed was the border of the property.
She was blonde, out of my league. We made small talk and got lost.
Suddenly, there we were, face-to-face with a tiny river of life, bending glistening grass.
Did she too dream of swollen streams in sunny forest glades?
The walk was awkward enough to bring that up, so I watched the creek longingly as we hiked parallel to it for a hundred yards or so.
Last week, a spring that eluded my attention for 20 years presented itself to me. It lies at the northern tip of the very busy Long’s Park in Lancaster, PA. I never knew until recently that it feeds the “goose poop” pond, a man-made attraction that never seemed that attractive to me.
The whole area is overrun with development, but this bubbler emerges into a mini-wetland of various grasses and shrubs, lush with greenery and, I’m sure, amphibian life.
Last summer, I rented a mountain bike in Winter Haven, Colorado. Though I was fighting a head cold, I climbed a mountain road two miles or so and then came racing down it, throwing rocks off the back tire and laughing with abandon.
Before I returned the bike, I rode behind an apartment complex and stopped on a footbridge over a flatland. The stream below me meandered crisp and clean over prairie grass on its way to lower elevations.
As Rich Mullins sings, “and the streams are all swollen with winter, winter unfroze, and free to run away now.”
The scientific explanations of the water cycle are interesting to me and marvelous in their own way. But what explains my dream, my longing, my joy and it’s elusive fulfillment?