Tuesday afternoon was Grandma’s funeral. It was a nice service and the outpouring of love from everyone who was touched by her was tremendous.

It a little bit it was odd to see so many people I haven’t seen in forever. I felt a bit bad because I didn’t recognize them, but they recognized me. This including some childhood friends. Anyway, at some point or another, everyone there yesterday had been to Grandma’s house as a kid to play and we all enjoyed this creek at the end of the street.

There were only three houses on the street (Kimball) and one that was on the street that ran perpendicular to Kimball. The house that was on the perpendicular street, its backyard went up to the creek and while we tried to play in that area, we generally stayed away for fear of getting in trouble with the owners of that house.

Grandma’s house was furthest away from the creek, then next to it was the house that my friends Shantel and her twin brothers Quentin and Quincy lived in. On the other side was the house that Miss Louise owned.

Anyway, the creek was rather muddy and dirty and backed up to this giant hill where some other houses were atop. As kids, it was always this mission to see if we could climb up the hill to get to the other side. We could have easily gone around it on the streets, but what fun would that be when you could climb the hill.

Needless to say, whenever we tried going past a particular area, we ALWAYS would get in trouble with Grandma for going places we weren’t supposed to go. Miss Louise would yell at us about it as well since we were so close to her house. We sometimes would start at the middle of the creek and try to make our way across, but often times, we ended up close too Miss Louise’s house. And then we’d try to get out of there as fast as possible because we didn’t want to get in trouble with her. She was a nice lady, but sometimes a little scary.

Of those of us who had the opportunity to play in this creek, only my mom was not brave enough to try. Apparently, there were snakes and she is deathly afraid of them. I don’t recall there being snakes, but then again since I was usually hanging out with Quentin, Quincy and two other boys (Travis and Demetrius who lived up the hill on the perpendicular street) I had to do what the boys were up to because why not? We are all the same roughly so it made sense that we all played together as kids.

Until yesterday, I had kind of forgotten all about the creek adventures and the constant trouble we all would get in to which led to having to pick out the best switches from another field nearby. If you don’t know about switches, that is ok. I think it is a southern thing as Grandma grew up in Alabama.

Anyway, the only person who hadn’t experienced the creek was my cousin who is only 20. By the time she would have been old enough to venture to it, she had already moved to Michigan so she didn’t get to experience the adventures of the creek.

Everyone discovered yesterday that we weren’t the only ones who got yelled at about the creek. We all thought it was just something we did and got yelled at about, but everyone got yelled at about it. We did go by it yesterday after the service and it was fun for everyone to remember all the trouble we had gotten into because of wanting to explore around that creek. Maybe one day I will go visit that old creek again, but this time, I most likely won’t be trying to climb that hill.