The Falls

I just got back from a couple of days on my farm in Barlow, Ohio. Whenever I go back, I take a hike to the Falls. The Falls is a beautiful formation in the creek that meanders through my farm. It's about a four foot high drop of water from a stone-lined stream into a round pool, carved out by millions of years of swirling waters. During the hot summer Sundays of my childhood, my Grandpa would load all my cousins into an old green wagon hitched to his old grey Ford tractor and we would be pulled along the old stagecoach road back to the Falls. We always took along our cane fishing poles and fat worms dug up in the rich compost around the barn. The fish we caught were pretty small...we called them suckers and maybe some sunfish. Taking a swim in the Falls was always refreshing, but a little frightening because of the crawdads...some of them were around four or five inches long.