NOW PLAYING AT A RESACA NEAR YOU.....

(Ed.'s Note: They are called ox-bow lakes, or in the local parlance, a resaca, an old river bed that was left behind when spring floods cut a new course of the Rio Grande toward the Gulf of Mexico. Dams and man-made obstacles like levees have made the annual flooding a memory of the past. Fortunately, residents on this side of the river did not fill them in like they did across the river in Matamoros.

As you drive east from Rio Grande City, the first hints that this was once a river delta (not a valley) begins just as you reach La Feria with its palm stands and gets progressively greener as you cross the Arroyo Colorado between Harlingen and San Benito. But it isn't until you hit Brownsville that these "lakes" begin to appear. Water, of course, attracts ducks, wildlife and other types of bird life. This is a scene from the resaca next to Trevino Funeral Home along Old Port Isabel Road.

Sometimes we take scenes like this for granted. As below freezing weather lashes our neighbors in the north and Midwest, they would love to be able to walk in shorts and shirt sleeves like we do here. Go for it. Take a hike in our great outdoors.)