The Rock Crossing Was Real
As a child, I was more than blessed to grow up surrounded not just by my grandparents—but also one of my great-grandparents. My mother’s grandmother was born in the very era Willow Creek is set in. I spent hours with her as a little girl, and I cherish those memories still. The stories in my family weren’t something I researched—they were passed down around dinner tables, spoken in quiet voices, exchanged in shared glances and half-finished sentences that left the rest to the imagination...
If you’ve read Letters from Willow Creek, you might be interested to know: a real creek inspired the entire story world. The image of the Rock Crossing—that wide stretch of slate-like stones where the water slows and the light settles just right—that was a real place from my childhood. We sat there. Picnicked there. Watched the light dance in the shallows and the trees lean in close.
Later in the series, “the rock crossing” becomes a place where characters sit, reflect, and decide. It always meant those things to me.
That Rock Crossing runs through land my dad’s family homesteaded—land my grandfather built a life on. He was born around 1910, and when he married my grandmother in the early 1930s, they were a bit like Clara and Reid. He was country. She was city. But she dove in with everything she had—just like Clara—and from that came the legacy that raised me.
When I was ten, we left a big town in Texas and moved to a small rural Midwest community to be near my dad’s parents. My family built a house on that land—my dad’s inheritance—but while it was going up, we lived with my grandparents in the little farmhouse on the hill where my dad and his sister were born. That summer—and every Sunday dinner after—the stories poured out like water from a well.
I still remember one of my first tractor-driving lessons, barreling downhill toward the Rock Crossing. Grandpa was riding on the fender, and when the tractor hit wrong, he fell off—and lost his teeth in the commotion. He just stood up, picked them up out of the dirt, rinsed them off in the creek, and popped them back in like nothing ever happened.
We laughed about that day for years.
That’s just how it was in our family. That’s just life on the land. That’s what it meant to be part of a family who stayed. And every single time we crossed the creek after that, Grandpa would grin and threaten to throw one of us in. Of course, we knew he was joking—because right after he said it, he’d start laughing so hard his shoulders would shake.
That’s what Willow Creek became for me:
A way to honor the ones who stayed.
Who mended.
Who chose love, and roots, and land—and stories.
And that Rock Crossing?
It’s still there.
Just like the people who shaped it.
—Juliet
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