A Bayou by any Other Name

After first moving to southeast Texas, it took me a while to realize a bayou is kind of a fancy word for a drainage ditch.

How pretty could a drainage ditch possibly be? Lately, I’ve spent more time walking the paths along the bayou with one of my dogs and I’ve come to realize and appreciate the beauty of a bayou. 

The bayou in my neighborhood is a channelized (paved) one, but there’s still an amazing amount of animal life around it. Seeing egrets are herons are an everyday occurrence. Once I saw what I thought was a stray dog, but it turned out to be a coyote. Turtles the size of toilet seats sun themselves on the concrete embankment. Last weekend, I saw a hawk on the sidewalk looking under my fence. At night, opossum cut through my yard and bats fly overhead. All of this under the shadow of downtown Houston. It’s really quite amazing.