Mill Creek Park Remembered

we’d head back home, probably just short of frost bite, to pull off wet everything – boots, gloves, hats, scarves, snow pants, socks, jackets. Sometimes you had to go all the way down to your skin to be dry. The next day we did it all over again.

Our mothers were relieved when the first buds of spring meant that the time to put away boots, gloves, snow pants, hats, and winter coats had arrived. Once again, Mill Creek Park found its own way of marking the season – tree branches bounced back after the months of ice and snow weighing them down. The park streams now freed of ice flowed freely along their curvy waterbeds. A blur of yellow along the banks and hills of Lake Newport made me glad that my fifth grade teacher, Ms. Pedlar, demanded that we memorize Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils,” and as in that poem the daffodils of Daffodil Hill were “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”

If as a kid you have had the great fortune of Mill Creek Park in your backyard that beginning stays with you forever. It is a recurring image in your mind and always a destination on trips back home.