I miss Dearing Branch. That small branch ran across one of the property lines of the farm I grew up on and it was my summertime home. My friends and I spent many happy hours there during hot weather.

Every summer we would dam the branch trying to make a swimming hole. There was one fairly deep hole where the branch widened then narrowed down, running between two big sweet gum trees growing on either bank. That made the perfect place to dam it up.

We did things that would have made us rebel if our parents had made up work so hard. We would take croaker sacks and fill them with sand to stop the water flow. Have you ever tried to move a big sack of wet sand? We soon learned to fill them very near where we wanted to place them.

One summer dad got some cross ties to use around the farm and we managed to drag one across the field, into the woods and to the branch. It gave our dam the backbone needed to hold the sacks and that summer we got a swimming hole with enough water to come up to our chins while standing up. We could actually swim some in it a little, but the hole was only about 15 feet wide and 20 feet long at most. It was still huge to us boys.

The cool water was great and a welcome relief after the hard work building the dam. We never bothered with bathing suits, we just stripped down and went skinny dipping. But the first heavy rainstorm would wash our dam away and we would have to start all over again. We never gave up, though.

Most summers near the end of August the branch would almost dry up and we would try to rescue the fish. We had a good supply of water at the house so we would carry the small catfish and bream up to the back yard in buckets and put them in wash tubs. A hose kept water running into the tubs and we learned to place them so the water cascaded from one to another, keeping several full.

The fish never lived more than a few days. And we never thought about the conflict between trying to rescue fish one day then going to a local pond, catching fish and cleaning them to eat the next day. Such were the ideals of youth.

I loved fishing in the branch, too. My greatest thrill was getting small bream and branch minnows to hit a “fly” made out of chicken feathers that I tied on a small bream hook with some of mom’s sewing thread. I would spend hours dangling the small bait near a stump in a hole in the bank of the branch trying to lure the skittish fish out. They were great trophies but I always let them go.

I guess what I really miss are the long, seemingly endless summer days of my youth, where a small bream was a trophy, we thought we could control our world with dams and dreams, and the responsibilities of adult life were still far in the future.