In My Former Life as a Prairie Girl, a Concrete Creek Was Our Life Source

Viewing my childhood home with new eyes

I was a middle class kid growing up in the late 80s/early 90s in suburban Chicago. I had my own walkman, Boston Market takeout meals, and tons of electricity to waste.

But my dream? My dream was to be a 19th century homesteader without running water.

Give me Anne of Green Gables or Little House on the Prairie — it was all glorious to me. I dreamed of wide open fields, berry picking, and horse and buggy rides to the general store.

My split-level suburban home was nowhere near as romantic as a log cabin in the wilderness or a creaky Victorian farmhouse with chamber pots on Prince Edward Island.

Needless to say, I spent hours of my childhood immersed in my 19th century fantasies. My neighbor Laura and I would run across the soccer field near my house pretending we were traipsing across the Missouri plains in long handmade dresses.

We set up entire worlds along the banks of our neighborhood creek.

We’d steal my mom’s wooden salad bowls and hold them in the crooks of our arms, pretending to gather berries and herbs for dinner. We would climb down the steep banks on either side of the creek and pretend to go “fetch some water” for the cabin.

Our neighborhood creek, unfortunately, was not an ideal water source. It was actually a retention well for street runoff built in the early 80s to prevent flooding.

There was no natural spring pumping this trickling water out from the depths of the earth. Its walls were lined with concrete, and when it hadn’t rained in a while it developed a heavy green layer of scum we pretended to ignore as we dipped our pails in it.

The bridge overlooking this creek is basically just a slab of concrete next to a road, and hoards of parents cheer for suburban soccer games about 20 feet away.

But we didn’t care about all of that. In our life as prairie girls, this creek was our life source.

I lived near that retention creek for my entire childhood, until this prairie girl grew up and boarded a plane for college.

Years later, I started to look down my nose at that split-level suburban house and our fake creek.

In my early twenties in Brooklyn, my penchant for prairie life swung wildly in the other direction. I vowed never to live anywhere that didn’t have an extensive subway system and expensive lattes on offer.

I came home to see family, but the suburban scene of my youth was no longer charming to me. That creek was just an ugly receptacle for street sewage.

And then, years later, I had children of my own.

I’m raising them in a big city, but my personal preferences have now landed somewhere right in the middle between Little House on the Prairie and the NYC Subway system. I now own a Honda CR-V.

I bring my boys often to visit this suburban home. My parents still live in this house near the retention creek. Most of the drinking glasses in the cabinet are the same as when I was a kid, and the carpet in the living room is worn completely down in places.

When we visit, my boys sleep on air mattresses in the room where I lay awake thirty years ago imagining my life with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert.

I’ve developed a new love for this spot on the map where I came to be. I love the boring houses, and the soccer games on the weekends. And I’ve developed a new attachment to our fake creek.

Just this week, I watched my sons marvel in its waters.

We were all dressed up for the cold weather, attempting a visit to the neighborhood playground that’s just past the soccer field.

It’s the same playground where I got to second base with my first boyfriend one summer night under a slide, and where that same boyfriend broke up with me the next summer and left me sobbing on the swings.

But we never made it to the playground.

My sons wanted to walk down to the creek, where the edges had frozen in the cold. They threw reeds into the water and watched them float by, and they tested their luck by walking out onto the frozen parts in their boots.

My youngest son crouched down near the water and watched the bubbles forming under the ice.

We stayed there by that creek for over an hour, just the three of us, in the December cold.

And I realized that I’d gotten what I wanted all along.

I was never able to figure out time travel and grow up to become Anne of Green Gables or Laura Ingalls Wilder. I never made it to the prairie or the Canadian seashore.

But with my boys, our creek can be a fresh spring in the middle of the wilderness if we want it to be. We can ignore the green scum and the concrete.

I can be that little girl pretending to pick berries, and the girl riding through her 20s on the NYC Subway, and a mom with a CR-V who keeps telling her own mom to buy new water glasses.

By my fake little creek, I can be anyone I want to be.

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