I know this is the third sappy family post, but bear with me. I have two brothers, both of whom are exceedingly talented.  Zach comes home later this summer from England, where he is finishing his masters at Oxford in something highly intellectual.  He also takes amazing photos. Zach is a force that cannot be stopped and must be followed. When Zach started rock climbing, the whole family took to the mountains. When Zach started eating mushrooms, we all admitted that we had loved them for years. When Zach dove into photography, we all started studying cameras and taking pictures and insisting that we had always wanted to be photographers.

Lyman was always the baby brother who got dragged along on his big siblings’ adventures. But then sometime during my first year at college he shot up 8 inches and got a beard. Now he is in college studying economics, leading organizations, and writing poetry in his spare time. How did I get such wonderful brothers?

Recently I found one of Lyman’s poems that I love. It is about the creek that we have grown up playing in, and it made me think about Kentucky summers. It made me think of driving in the car with my brothers and Zach making us stop to take photos, of sitting outside, and hiking down creeks, and capturing perfect summer moments. So here are two photos from one brother and a poem from the other.

On Hiking Down Indian Creek

Flowers grow on the carriage road

 To Harrodsburg. I saw them, wild and violet,

Suffering my tread. The old road where no one goes

Has growing things upon it; saplings among the mile-stones.

Where a bridge had spanned a creek, I walk

Across the Cataract, alive at last, in the wreck

Of unravelled roads shorn of travelers.

And the water is coursing, the same, I know it;  

 
I am old in water-years, having seen droughts    

 
And floods, tumbled banks and sediment. But

That sentiment is a little thing, for the road is old,

And even the woods around it whistle still

With the blooming of youth in the spring.

So in the place where the steps of men

Made flat the ground of Kentucky hills,

A memory of humanity makes garden plots

For God, and the old ways will walk again.