Blunn Creek surprises

I took my granddaughter Hannah to Blunn Creek yesterday. She brought her plastic pail and a plastic wiffleball with a big plan to catch some fish and put some algae in the ball so they would have food.

We parked about midway in the length of Stacy Park, in the Travis Heights neighborhood, very near where I lived and raised her mother, Lela, from 1987-1997. We walked creekside. She was looking for a big swimming hole and said she'd been there lots of times before. But I had never been there with her.

I saw that the city had been doing some work in the park, cutting down brush, revealing a new creekside trail. Lovely. Blunn Creek cuts through limestone, and often there are limestone shelves girding the creek.

We neared the Eastside Drive bridge. I watched Hannah follow a ledge and continue to where the ledge got so narrow, she needed to hold the cliffside with both hands to keep from sliding down rock into water. She clenched the handle of her pail between her teeth to free her hands.

She is amazingly fearless doing things like this. To me, she moves more like an experienced rock climber than a 7-year-old. I give her no instructions; she figures it out herself in the moment and moves with grace.

She ran out of ledge and had to turn back and retrace her path. We carefully avoided the poison ivy as we crossed the creek several times.

We followed the creek under the bridge and discovered that the Eastside apartments had done some fantastic landscaping on one side of the creek. There was a rock retaining wall to prevent erosion, built artfully. We walked along that and around a bend where a nice wide rock ledge extended a way and then ended. From that point on, the creek was unpassable except by wading on slippery rocks.

When I lived with Lela on Newning, we lived far above the unpassable part. Our "backyard" was greenbelt, so steep and densely overgrown that we were unable to access the creek from our place. That backyard was full of birds. We fed cardinals, finches, sparrows, waxwings, jays, and squirrels on our deck, and even sometimes raccoons.

I sat and meditated while Hannah wandered around. On walks, she nearly always finds some kind of treasure, even if it's not what she thinks she's going to find. Her treasure last night was a dead baby armadillo. It was recently deceased and very clean looking. She got it into her pail, and we looked in awe at its shell, its big claws, its round ears. There was no sign of how it died. She wanted to bring it home, but I told her it needed to stay there and return to the elements.

We talked about reincarnation, and how if the baby armadillo somehow came back to life, it would probably want to get out of there, the place where it had died. But it might come back as something else. Hannah likes the idea of reincarnation.

We encountered at least six people on our walk. We never did find that big swimming hole she envisioned and figured later that she probably meant Barton Creek instead of Blunn Creek. Oh well! Now we have a new place.

Afterwards, we journeyed to Whole Foods for dinner and a few minutes on the playscape, then home for bath and reading and bed, and the end of a good day.