I'm sixty years now out of my mother's womb.
The things my grandparents told me and showed me are rare anymore.
When this generation passes on, who will be left to tell the story?
Who will know the way things were: when wagons were still the family transportation
and horses were tied to the sides of streets, and indians came to town.
Grandfather Ferrell showed me flocks of red-winged blackbirds flying in the sky
and told me to remember that when he was young a flock would fill the sky.
I saw one of the last Ivory-Billed WoodPeckers, high in a tree once.
Now they are gone. It was so huge.
Granpaw showed me all the different kinds of fish and little perch in the creek.
There were so many different kinds, and minows abounding, together with frogs and crawdads,
and dragon flies. And pussy-willow *, and cane, and broad-leaf grass as tall as I.
I cry for the children raised up in plastic and glass, chrome and cement and steel.
The old creek now is gone, with it's tall trees, it's eddies and currents, and mud. There were places where you could drink, where the water ran downhill over sandy bottom, sparkled by the sun, and sprayed into the air over the stones and sticks.
We rafted down that old creek, and saw catfish and snakes, spiders and bugs, butterflies and wasps.
Now my daughter had to travel all over town just to find ten different kinds of bug things, and mostly they were just variations of beetles.
We don't even leave any uncut grass in the alleys anymore, very little place for the rabbits, birds and squirrels to hide. The grasshoppers are nearly gone. The lizard horny toads are disappeared. Even the ants are not the same.
The ol creek used to be forty to sixty feet wide in some places, and was home for all kinds of life.
But now its been dredged out. It's trees and bush, bull-dozed down and covered over with cement. Then a couple inches of dirt poured on top and grown back over with smooth grass for its banks, dropping down into a cement bottom for drainage and flood prevention.

There used to be so many kinds of perch I gave up learning all their names in that creek, and catfish of many varieties; but now it's just dry most of the time, and nothing there.

No way for a little boy to cast a boat of paper on the water, or watch a pebble make it's waves, or see the echoing resonance of ripples as they beat off the shore and back through one another from each pebble tossed high into the air above the slowly moving creek. On a common day, maybe a matchbox boat would drift five or ten feet on that creek in a minute or so. It wasn't fast moving, just gently moving, and a marvelous thing to behold. Swirls and eddies would occur where the creek took a bend and a child could see how those whirlpools formed. He could cast a blade of grass onto the whirlpool and watch it spin around being drawn down. Or watch a boat in the center of the flow be drawn steadily, if slowly, downstream.
The creek would freeze in the winter and I could skate, slip and slide on it's icey surface. My grandmother said angels must've been watching over me. And I believe they were. I can still remember the time I watched a big snake take a catfish. That was a sight I watched intently.

Farther down the stream, in some places the banks were even wider, temping a young boy to see if he could throw a dirt clod clear across the water to land on the other side. And a tall tree hanging it's branches out over the sandy bend nearly as wide as a river here, where a boy could swing out on an old rotten Tarzan rope. Or run through the knee high grass fields leaping with his dog. Or make forts in the even higher grass that came to his shoulders. Digging holes, foxholes of course, where it seemed good, and grassy tunnels connected one to the other. Trees? Let's see. There were mulberry trees, blackberry vines on the fences and growing through the bushes; there were pecans, apricots, peach, pear, persimmon, plums, all kinds of plumb trees, cotton wood trees, oak trees, elm trees, and red oak trees.

I wanted to show such places to my boy, but places I could find to take him were polluted and dirty and he didn't like it much, and I understood, cause there was no beauty left. Not in places where I could find to take my boy. Makes me remember when my dad showed me a residential neighbor near Conroe, where he said we were going to see an old Indian place of forest and water, complete with a nice small lake, but it was taken over now and filled with houses and concrete.
No place left for the birds and squirrels and rabbits. Where have the birds gone.
My grandmother Ferrell used to love watching and listening to all the different kinds of birds and butterflies that came to her land with all its fruit and berry trees and vines and flowers and chickens and cats and two dogs, Grandpaw's named Spot, and mine, named Star.
I remember running through the woods and grassy fields with Star, as he leaped through the grass , leaped like a playful puppy through and over and above the knee high grass.

Grandpaw told me the name used to be O'Ferrell, but they (someone before him)changed it to be more American like; but he told me not to forget what it used to be.

Granpaw Ferrell was the only man I ever saw read the Bible regularly and consistently. I remember seeing him at night, with a light at the top of his bed, reading that Bible.

After his stroke, he tried to talk to me, but couldn't talk, and he just cried with big tears because there were things he wanted to say to me and couldn't.

Larry A. Rice, August 24, 2003
Mars is ascending this month like no time before and not for a long time after will we see such a close display of Mars. I wonder what events come with it. Well, the wars over the fuel of modern technology are rising, and more news of more groups of Arabs swearing America will pay with blood for what it has done.

I pray for the little children who get raised on tv and video games and plastic.

I pray for those who have no idea of history except the media common image and pleasure seeking and riches seeking and security and safety seeking in the system.

The greatest riches are eternal and in eternity. The short-sighted may trade all for a few moments gain in this present world, but the wise know an eternity follows.

Forgive me for my failures, and try to see the good I have lifted up.

For I did not re-discover the truth of God till I had been corrupted by ignorance.

Tis far better to begin on a good track and remain there, than to just briefly touch the good track and never have a light to see till twenty years later. A lot of harm can happen in twenty years, and it takes a lot of time to restore equilibrium and balance, and any strength at all.

I had no awareness of the guidance available in scripture till I was broken and crippled by failures in life. Had I been able to stay on the good track to which I was launched, a lot would have been different. But once that glorious momentum of a good high school graduation is lost, it is far hard to gain back the momentum for good in your life. Don't lose the good momentum. It is a blessing. Don't let go the faith of God and His holy inspired word, preserved to all generations.

Eagle Wing Menu

Footnote: The pussy-willow was so named because the soft short furry like growth on it was like the short fur on a cat's paw, pussy-cat, pussy-willow. No other reference intended.