Pussy willows are nostalgic part of spring

There’s no other plant that evokes past memories of spring for me than the pussy willow.

A wetlands area on our farm was full of them, and after a long Minnesota winter we’d scramble down our sledding hill to a boggy area that produced pussy willows in abundance. My brothers and I would carry them up to the house and present them to Mom by the armful, and then we’d run back down the hill to this magical place we called The Swamp.

We’d spend hours down there, hopping among the bumpy clods of earth in an area filled with water springs, careful not to let our feet slide into the mud because my oldest brother convinced us the mud was quicksand.

Among the willows there was a patch of land that would move up and down if we jumped on it. We’d tip-toe around, sure that if we pierced through the surface we’d be swallowed hole. To this day I have no idea if there really was something akin to quicksand in our swamp or whether we could have been sucked into it. We survived our childhood, and I suppose that’s all that matters.

During one of our outings to The Swamp, we uncovered a bunch of cow bones, which in hindsight should have been evident by their size, but of course our imaginations ran wild and we were sure they were human bones, perhaps from an Indian burial ground. American Indians had at one time occupied that area.

Our grandmother told us stories about Indians stopping at our house in the late 1800s. Her mother would send them off with care packages of food. Our father found a real arrowhead in one of the fields, and he had a good laugh when we confided to him about the mysterious bones we’d found.

For much of the summer The Swamp was a mosquito-infested place, but in the early spring it was our playground. Wild buttercups of some sort grew there, and we picked bouquets of them, too.

Our farmhouse and barn sit on a rise, and The Swamp that descends to the west, from what I’ve been told, is along the shoreline of the ancient Lake Agassiz, an immense body of water that existed in north-central North America during the last ice age. Our land is at the very eastern edge of the fertile Red River Valley, the glacial lake plain created from the sediment of Lake Agassiz.

My dad always suspected there were large quantities of gravel on our farm, what with being on the shoreline of an ancient lake and the fact that there were ample gravel reserves a few miles to the northwest. It seems to me he had some tests done and negligible amounts of gravel were found.

These days, The Swamp is prime ground for big-city hunters who pay for the right to trudge through the marshland looking for deer and ducks. There are no children left to frolic among the willows; we all grew up long ago.

When it’s springtime in the Rockies, my mind isn’t in the mountains. It’s among the willows, where I can still hear our laughter and recollect our silly antics. I see the pussy willows here, but they pull me back home to Minnesota every spring.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.