Flows The River

 I drove across the Mighty Mississippi this past week a couple of times for what must be the 500th time. No place to stop for a pic and I was alone, so the pictures are terrible, but what can you do.

I've crossed it several places over the years: a handful of times in St Cloud, MN, a few traverses at Dubuque, IA / Galena, IL, scores of times at St Louis, dozens at Memphis, a couple of times at Baton Rouge, LA and in New Orleans.

It still, somehow, never gets old, and I always think about the great volume of water that has made the almost 2500 mile journey from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana and all the people that have seen that water pass them by over thousands of years. 

A river is an apt metaphor for time, always flowing forward, always moving, yet with a path and direction that we sometime fight to overcome or redirect. Cultures, cities, and peoples come and go, streaming through the relentless flow of time, with occasional eddies that may form along the way but which eventually dissipate, giving way, finally, to the flow that is unstoppable before all becomes one again in the vastness of the ocean. It can be at once comforting and terrifying. 

As I crossed this last time from Illinois to Iowa I thought of my great Aunt Elaine, my grandmother’s sister who lives in a house her family built on the banks of the Mississippi near St. Cloud in Minnesota. Both my parents were only children, and thus I have no cousins, aunts, or uncles proper. My grandmother and I were really close, and she loved her sister, my great Aunt. 

They were different in many ways: Elaine more gregarious, gram more withdrawn and quieter. But still I saw aspects of both in each, and to a certain extent my gram still lives on for me via Aunt Elaine, and there she sits in her A-frame house on the very river I’m crossing now, again. 

She will be celebrating her 100th birthday next month and we’re excited to be able to see her to celebrate a life well-lived, a life that has seen a century of the Mighty Mississippi pass her by, the river just chugging along, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. The river endures, and so does she.