Wendell Berry’s poem Roveen posted Wednesday on Facebook got me going.

Our neighborhood creek, I told her, upstream, cows stand in the water.

We didn’t think much about the cows, at first. We called a spot near our house the beach and had picnics. We sat on lawn chairs in the middle of the flow, the icy thrill coursing up our legs, while the children made dams. A New York City kid along once, terrified of every kind of bug, could barely brave the place. Then I told her I’d give her a dollar if she’d lie flat in the water till it reached her ears—and she astounded everybody by doing it.

I had to pay the others then, too.

We don’t hang out there, anymore. Paulson sprays the poison ivy creekside, like before, so he and a grandson can wade into the felicitous, gurgling water to scoop up mayflies and crayfish to study, but what if cow-manure E. coli were to seep through a skin crack on either’s foot and land him in the hospital with sepsis? Am I too phobic?

Wendell says he goes and lies down where the wood drake rests. That’s nice. Wendell says wild things don’t tax their lives with forethoughts of grief, also nice. As the cows in the creek aren’t wild and the farmer could fence them out, nobody here would mind. Then we could sit again, free, under the day-blind stars. It’s an undespairing thought, is all.