My Pond Life

The heat has kept me indoors more than I’m comfortable with.  I miss the woods, but it’s been too hot even just for walking.  I’ll take a stroll in the back pasture, but the bugs are relentless and like the sheep and donkeys, it’s easier to be out in the night.  But by the time it gets dark, I’m tired from the day.

Then,  yesterday, in the evening, after the storm, I went to close the gate to the back pasture and found my world had cooled.  The grasses and wildflowers, soaked with rain, sparkled like snow in the slant of the sun.

The pond was full again,  soft brown with silt.

I closed the gate behind me but Fate slipped under it.  That didn’t disturb the frog that sat for a portrait, before disappearing into the water with a gentle plunk, leaving only a widening circle of water behind.

And just a foot or so away from where the frog sat, was the crayfish’s empty exoskeleton.  About six inches long, the tail separated from the rest of the body, the giant claw no threat to the Great Blue Heron who most likely ate them.

I breathed in the rich smell of living and dying that the pond offered. I felt my body relax in a way it hasn’t in weeks.  I watched the skates, spiders and snails step, glide and slide, while canoe shaped  insects with arms like oars, surfaced and vanished in the muddy water.

At some point Fate left the pond.  I don’t know how long she was at the gate in her border collie crouch waiting for me to tell her to get the sheep.

I only know that something shifted inside of me and fell back into place.  And a smile rose from deep in my stomach, like a salamander wiggling its way up from the bottom of the pond to pluck an insect from the top of the water.