1. Hickey 1
Danielle B. Hickey
Professor John Conner
Nonfiction Writing Workshop (ENG-330)
30 November 2014
The Stream
“What’s wrong?”
In that moment my mother looked to me like she would have dropped a plate had she
been holding one. Instead she set her hairbrush down overly gently on the bathroom sink.
“Please,” I begged, having appeared from my bedroom, sobbing. My voice cracked and I
surprised even myself with my desperation. “Can we go to the field? Now? I want to go home.”
My mother nodded silently, eyes searching.
“Okay.”
The field is what my family called the empty half-acre of land on the far side of my
childhood barn. It had been filled with vineyards once upon a time but was razed before we’d
moved in. The field was notorious for being ignored and overgrown, used primarily by farmers
to reach the depths of the vineyards that still sprung up behind it.
The upper right-hand corner of the field broke off into a grassy trail large enough for two
cars to drive side-by-side. The end the trail extended as far as the eye could see in either
direction, turning and curving along paths only the men operating the grapepickers were meant
to understand.
I knew them by heart.

2. Hickey 2
I darted out of the passenger side of my mom’s Jeep even before she had properly parked
on the side of the road alongside the field. I ran the field’s length to the mouth of the grape trail
and then some, noting briefly the rusted tangle of wire that separated the end of the path into two
lanes still existed beyond my childhood memory. I took a sharp left at the path’s end, sneakered
feet slipping on rain-wet grass, and then a left. For a long time I was mindful only of the
possibility of four-wheelers making their way in my direction.
By the time I was halfway to my destination, I was panting something fierce.
Emotionally distraught and physically exhausted, I still recall thinking that stopping to catch my
breath would ruin this scene if it were a movie.
As a child I’d run this path almost weekly. At one point in my childhood my closest
cousin’s family moved into the house that the other end of the path let out at. We’d meet in the
middle at the stream.
There we’d toss Barbies into the flow, watch them swim with the minnows until their hair
caught in a springy trap of moss. It was there we ran from opossums too bold to play dead, and
where we’d play in the grape vines, creating canopies out of waxy leaves the size of our hands
and seeking out rusted tags fallen from posts like gold.
The stream was where I was headed and where I ultimately arrived. It wasn’t so much a
stream as it was a slow trickle of water that let out at the roadside in a collection of water too
large to be a puddle and too small to be a pond. Its water was swampy and the stream itself was
surrounded by waist-high grass on land too tilted to be mowed with any confidence. As a child

3. Hickey 3
I’d shake the crackly yellow grass to startle toads into jumping into the water. My hiccoughing
scared them into doing the same, then.
There I forced myself to untie my shoes and stuff my socks into my pockets. I allowed
myself only a brief moment of hesitation, then sunk my toes into shallow mud the consistency of
pancake batter. I set the pace of my breathing to the speed of dirty brown tadpoles making their
way across my skin.
When my mom found me, she found me there, standing still in the stream in the paths in
the vineyards. She tells me she knew I’d be here when I ask her how she’s found me.
“I was afraid to put my feet in the water,” I explained, energy gone with the tadpoles and
my tears. I looked up to my mom’s face. “I never used to be.”
“I know,” she said, understanding. She didn’t tell me to put my shoes back on.
We stay there until my ankles begin to protest the running water.
On the ride back into town, we pass the pond the stream’s water leaks from, and the
woods in which a portion of it disappears.
In our driveway, closer to the heart of downtown than any vineyards, neither of comment
when I elect to cross the yard without shoes on for the first time in years.