A walk down memory lane...in the rain

Today began with many ideas of what might come...playing with family...getting together with friends...lots of ideas. We ended up, at the request of our oldest, heading back to our old neighborhood. We drove around familiar streets sharing memories and pointing at things we remembered and things that were new. We drove by our first and well-loved home smiling as we saw the daffidols we had planted brightly in bloom. We tried to stop by a few friends homes, but unfortunately didn't find anyone home. Still, it was very satisfying as we drove around. We had some wonderful times while we lived up there and we still have some great friends there that we love getting together with. Memories can be such treasures that are often forgotten until we bring them out to enjoy again. {Sigh}

While we lived up north, our oldest(and for most of the time our only child) and I would often go for walks to a nearby park that had three ponds.
Can you believe that our oldest was this little at one time?

These ponds were unchartered territory where anything was possible. In the winter and spring the paths would often be flooded over, in the late spring baby ducks would abound, summer brought frogs--or at least we are assuming that is the case as their chorus was always heard--even though we never actually did see one. Hmmmm. The one constant with it all was that we never went on a walk there without bringing some type of bread. Today was no exception. After retrieving some old, freezer burned hotdog buns that had been in our deep freeze for who knows how long (ducks don't seem to mind) we were off!

Our oldest had no problem navigating the pond banks as he had done it many times before, but I hadn't thought that this was actually the first time our middle son was exploring these ponds. He wasn't too familiar with the marshy banks lined with cattails, and within the first few minutes he was muddy and wet! You can see him towards the back of this picture learning how muddy the banks were.

We hadn't been feeding the ducks long when we were greeted by a wet rodent of sorts wanting some of our delicious bread. The only problem was when he was around the ducks would leave!!

Our youngest wasn't sure about it all. He was watching his brothers, and he was watching the ducks. He didn't make one noise for quite a while--he just kept looking.

We headed over to the last pond to share our goodies with the ducks there. If you look closely you might notice something just behind our middle son. Wouldn't you know it, the muskrat had followed us to this pond to get more bread.

Or maybe he just liked our company? ;)