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Early November at My Father’s Pond

I grew up on the property where this pond is now. The pond didn’t used to be there. It was a swamp of springs that produced one mighty stream. My father in the early 70s bulldozed the swamp and made a dam, a beautiful one, although the stream, which still runs, trickles where it once flowed. I loved that stream but love the pond as well.

I will always remember the seasons where I grew up, especially the autumn, which I prefer in many ways, the changing colors, the energetic days, still brisk with sun but getting cold enough that the flies no longer bite when you walk or work outside or go for a horseback ride, the flies no longer buzzing around the horse’s eyes either. I’m sure even the horses prefer the autumn.

The winter was cold, and there was snow to shovel, though after the shoveling, my mother prepared eggs and scrapple with syrup in the warm kitchen. Winter has its warmth and eating, but I’m sure like me, the horse as well, preferred the early spring when the buds on every branch are just about to open, forsythia already spreading a welcome yellow along the fence, so much better than the summer when the nagging flies start coming and chiggers hide in the high grass to itch your sweating skin.

Of course, it is in the summer you can jump in the pond and start to swim. This you can’t comfortably do in the autumn, a colder time of harvest and thanksgiving, but in metamorphic autumn, there are joys in growing older, let’s not forget.










4 Comments

  1. it’s just so wonderful.. cannot imagine not being a poet there…

  2. Poet’s paradise! So very beautiful.

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