Creeks

Well, I have spent a good part of the last week trying to find a suitable photo for this week’s - Creek entry. Actually I like the sound of that…Creek Week, but it’s Creek Week and I have no photo!

It’s because I have in my mind so many special memories of playing in the creek near our house as a kid – that I wanted an actual photo of the creek – or of the creek I can see in my memory. In real life I think the creek is actually called Balcombe Creek.

I grew up in what used to be a little seaside village on the Mornington Peninsula – called Mt Martha. Now I think it’s some fancy pants suburb but back when I was a kid it was paddocks and cows (& the odd scary bull), magpies that swooped you on the way to school, field mushrooms as big as dinner plates, heaps of pine cones that we would collect and burn in the open fire, dirt roads, going to play with my little kindy friend Ella under the big Pine tree in the paddock that separated our houses, lighting fires in the driveway (ok…I only did that once and I was testing out my ‘newly learnt’ girl guide building a camp fire skills), feeding the horses after school, fanging round on my bike with my pink or was it yellow? Stackhat (remember those? What a great name – ‘Stackhat’) anyway I digress. This entry is supposed to be about creeks and how they make my heart sing …..so…the photos above I’m sorry will have to paint the picture for you on my love of creeks.

The walking track photo was taken at the summit of Mt Martha and reminds me of the bush I used to spend hours exploring (now I think back – I would disappear for almost a whole day and my mother would never know where I was – but now I am a mother – my daughter Kitty isn’t even allowed to play in the front yard by herself….mmmm, how times have changed or is it just where we live?).

Anyway the other photo is of me – aged about 8 or 9 I think. The one thing that really struck me about it – was that I have no shoes on and really dirty feet – sums up nicely the fun I had as a kid I think. Poor Kitty is not even allowed to walk outside without shoes on…..makes me want to bundle her up, take her to the bush (somewhere with a big beautiful creek), take her shoes off and splash!