Sandy Creek is a winter creek, an ephemeral creek. It flows when the valley around it is sodden and weeps with water. This year, despite the dry late winter, it has been running till just recently, but now it has stopped.
Come summer, the creek is not attractive in the way it is when the water flows brightly, but this is its life cycle, and I'm slowly getting to appreciate it. I no longer think, when the flow stops, that the creek is dying. Tadpoles flit through the ponds left by the last rains. Soon the night will reverberate with the froggy chorus.
And good news for me: walking down there yesterday, knocking over the first of the summer weeds, I saw that in a couple of weeks it will be dry enough for me to get to the last of the gorse there on the opposite bank.
