The Creek (Hush, it's a secret)

My father was a very protective parent.  As he told me many years later, the shock of losing Jill rocked both my parents to their very cores and the horror of their life was to lose another child.  My brother Peter remembers how absurd (he thought) Dad was when he told him not to cross the street – when he was 12 and we lived in one of the quietest neighbourhoods in Kitchener!  It was just such a habit with Dad.

 

But don’t run away with the idea that we were angelic, obedient little children.  Far from it.  Not that we were wilfully disobedient but when the muse of game playing was upon us (well, maybe that is a little too fanciful a description – when we got carried away) we simply forgot “the rules” and did things we weren’t really allowed to do.  Like cross Appleby Line (that was the road perpendicular to our street) to play at the creek.  To be fair, we didn’t do that in the first couple of years living in Burlington but that was only because there were no children living on the other side of Appleby Line.  It was lined with older homes and elderly people.

 

One day we did go across the street for some reason or other and we went past the houses and down into a field, then an embankment and wonder of wonders, we discovered The Creek.  Good golly but did we ever have fun splashing, throwing stones and skipping them.  Trying to catch the frogs and then we discovered FISH.  We were in our element.  And when we came home with our “soakers” (that’s what we called our wet socks and shoes) Mom wondered how we could get so wet when there hadn’t been a drop of rain for weeks.  She used to say “my kids could find water in a desert”!

 

We crossed that street almost daily for summers on end and my parents never, ever knew that it existed. One memorable day we decided to follow the creek to its source and we ended up crossing under a tunnel The Queen Elizabeth Highway (or Queenie 2 as it was known to us) to Lake Ontario.  Talk about a thrill but at the same time we knew we would get into really deep trouble if Dad ever found out we had crossed the highway so we only did that the one time.  Another time we decided to go in the opposite direction and we crossed under New Street.  It was just Jeanette and I but we had to turn back when suddenly a huge black dog appeared.  Nette was terrified of dogs so we turned around and again never went back!

I wonder if that creek is still there?