Elder's Corner: Anne Stadler

Anne Stadler

Photos and Text by Elder Anne Stadler

My neighborhood in Lake Forest Park is a walking neighborhood. On a recent misty gray day, I walk to my City Hall to pay one of my bills; then I circle over to Third Place Commons for a sitdown and a warm decaf latte.

My next stop: the Lake Forest Park Water District, home of the finest artesian water on the planet! They have a wonderful Post Box into which you put your bills, mounted on the fence for your convenience.

After circling back on quiet residential streets, I cross Ballinger Way and head for the McKinnon Creek Trail entrance.

McKinnon Creek Trail entrance

En route, i stop at a new? sitting place hanging from a hospitable cedar arm arcing beside the dirt road.

A new? sitting place

I can hear the gurgling creek as it narrows into a culvert near the trail head

On the trail I enter a space of silence, punctuated by a pileated woodpecker busily demolishing an old spar, and the sound of the creek rippling ... a world away from Ballinger Way, less than a hundred yards behind me.

On my left, half way along, i greet a crumbling old growth friend, a cedar stump decaying from the inside. It's a  surviving relic of the logging era, that happened in the early 1900s, more than fifty years before I began walking this trail.

A cedar stump from the logging era

Farther in, traces of a neighbor's trail lead up a steep hill into her back garden.

Trail to a neighbor's back garden

Then, home at last, our steps, slick with moss and mud ....  And the climb up to our home.

"Home again... Totsey Sue" as my little sister used to say when we turned the corner into our street 75 years ago in Rochester New York.  

And i marvel that I've been turning THIS corner, trudging up this hill into our backyard, since before Lake Forest Park became a town.