We had a quiet Christmas day, just the three of us, and in the late afternoon Joe and I went to Ring Park. A blue sky, and all the trees lit by the low winter sun.

There were few visitors; we were alone on the overlook. We leaned on the rail and looked down to where a clear white-sand-bottom stream runs into the tannic waters of Hogtown Creek. We listened to each other as we puzzled through what to do about a strong-willed teenager who is stuck on a dead end road, and an old woman, her brain damaged by years of alcohol, who is facing eviction.

Then we were quiet and just listened to the woods. A bird call. A family passing on the trail – children, parents, grandparents, leashed dogs. I thought I heard a man singing to his toddler, but when I looked through the trees I saw he was alone with his dog.

You can watch a creek for a long time. The water flows through shade and sunlight over dips and rises in the creekbed; reflections shiver and shimmer. We need an impressionist’s palette and brush to capture the movement and colors: gold, brick, ochre.

I was at Murder Creek in the Oconee National Forest, watching twigs and leaves float by, when my inner voice said, “gifts of the river,” and I knew I had to take in two children who had bounced from home to home in foster care. One stayed with me almost two years, and a few years later I had the granddaughter we’re now raising.

We left the overlook and walked off the trail down to the sandy bank, stood at the bottom of the oxbow loop. We dropped leaves in the water, to carry away our anxiety and anger. We watched them twist and turn in the current, float downstream, enter an eddy and float back up, lie still in a backwater, snag on the bank. I picked up a hickory twig with six leaves – anger, love, resentment, hope, fear, grief. I threw it in, though I knew that tangle of troubles would never make it downstream.

If we waited long enough the leaves freed themselves from bank and backwater, but we grew tired of waiting and poked them free. Our granddaughter is stuck: when and how do we intervene, when do we let her find her own way? Can we believe that she will leave the backwater and move on?