Just outside a little bitty town in Arkansas called Antoine--which has a population of maybe 200 people and I doubt it's that many--there is a small river called Wolf Creek.
I grew up hearing about it, but I was nearly a teenager the first time I can remember that I was ever actually there.
The water is cold, crystal clear, and sparkling. The water and air are clean and fresh; there is no industry anywhere near there, and both earth and sky are unstained. When the wind blows you can hear it sing in the pines on the rolling hills. In the autumn it is often so quiet that you can hear single leaves fall. The air is so pure and clean if you breath it too fast, it'll make your head hurt.
You breathe respectfully in Antoine while wading in Wolf Creek, and whatever worries you might be carrying, the water washes them away.
That is my home of the heart, the place where my roots go back to the soil.
It's always been a special place to my family.
My mother's people lived outside Antoine. As a child, she walked barefoot down dirt roads to the one-room schoolhouse in Antoine.
My father's people lived outside Delight, "just a piece" down the road. When my father was courting my mother, he walked to her house through the woods, a distance of just over ten miles.
It's a place where yesterday and today meet. Antoine is relatively unchanged from the town that my mom knew as a child. Some of the roads are paved, now, and there are sometimes contrails across the sky, but not often.
Up in a little hollow outside Antoine, there is a cemetery. If someone is being buried, it always drizzles cold rain. If you play a fife there on a wet day, the sound will carry for miles over the hills, and perhaps the fish in Wolf Creek hear it, and are startled.
But the cemetery isn't the place my heart calls home, though both my parents sleep there, in the shadows of the trees.
When I think of the place I always want to go (and so seldom do), it's to the waters of Wolf Creek sparkling in the sunlight.
I don't have a picture--cameras haven't been invented in Antoine yet
--but you'll just have to trust me: it's one of the most beautiful places on earth.
--James
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or trout or a nice pike, watching my wife make perfect casts, and watching the pups play in the river or chase those evil big white birds on the lochs.
