Random Ramblings

This is the creative non-fiction piece I read at the Guelph Spoken Word evening, Grounded, on April 22nd.  The theme of the call for submission was ‘exploring our relationship with our landbase’ (in honour of Earth Day).

A roddon, also written as rodham, is the dried raised bed of a watercourse such as a river or tidal-creek, especially in the Fen District of East Anglia in England. (Wikipedia)

Beyond the village, west towards that great bay of the North Sea called The Wash, flat fields of barley and wheat, latticed with ditches, lie on either side of the right-of-way out to the water. Once, this was marsh, and from the satellite images on Google Earth, the patterns of waterflow can still be seen, like a ghost, or a memory, held in the soil. Roddons, they are called, these traceries remembered in the land.

I grew up with stories of this…