Our Side of the Creek

“Across the creek, the soaring weeping willow’s dangling branches swayed in the breeze; its slender leaves whispered to us.”

Though my short pieces usually lean toward dark, Our Side of the Creek is an exception. One of its main characters, the enormous weeping willow, was inspired by a similar tree from my childhood in upstate New York. The fictional tree’s fate is similar to what happened to the real tree during my younger brother’s tenth birthday party.

During the summer, five-year-old Millie and her preteen and teenage brothers are “left to their own devices” by their parents. She’s included in her brothers’ mischief, and as her only companions, they encourage, protect and challenge her. But a destructive storm and the neighbors’ actions alter their landscape.

One of the things I love about writing fiction is that the writer gets to live the experience of his or her characters. Writing from Millie’s perspective gave me three older brothers and a summer spent outside (July and August in Richmond are intolerably hot).

At first glance, the Ianelli family on the opposite side of the creek may appear harsh and unreasonable. But their property, and perhaps owning land, means something to them. To children and young teenagers, new property lines on what they’d considered an empty field might feel arbitrary and insignificant. When what they’d assumed was theirs is destroyed, the siblings are devastated.

The enormity of the children’s loss, summer’s end, and the inevitable changing priorities of the boys creates distance in the siblings. Millie, without her playmates, and “bored, bored, bored” with her first year of school, comes into her own when she makes a discovery in the creek. In the final lines, she no longer follows behind her brothers.

I wrote an early version of this story in Tracy Rothschild Lynch’s class at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Studio School. You can find her at https://tracyrothschildlynch.wordpress.com. Thanks to Valparaiso Fiction Review, who published Our Side of the Creek in May 2024. The folks at that publication do a very cool thing—they send a “download report” to their authors so we can see if anyone is reading our work. There have been over 180 downloads of this story. I have no idea why, but I like knowing.

Nothing to report on finding an agent for Degrees of Forgiving, other than another rejection and a whole lot of silence. I’m crawling through chapters of my new novel. I should come up with a working title besides the main character’s first name, Liza. She was named after the first American female physician by her physician parents. You’re probably not surprised to learn that she doesn’t meet expectations.  

Thanks for coming along.

Heather