Lookingglass Valley Dreams 2 (the pond)

Part two in my magical memories series✨

Photo by Lee Soo hyun on Unsplash

Everything in Lookingglass Valley is touched by an earthy scent of green-brown fecundity. A moist, misty, mossy, damp smell of good healthy growing seeds. Tall waving fields of dry hay waiting to be baled. Acres of crops planted in dark, rich soil, a whiff of chemical fertilizer and petrichor after a summer shower. The dry, dusty suggestion of cow manure in the air, carried on an errant breeze from a distant barnyard. Some places in the valley are even more possessed of this wild and joyous nature than most. The pond adjacent to my Aunt and Uncle’s home on Larson Road was one of those places.

It was a small, man-made and man stocked pond, but by the time I was old enough to visit it's shores, most all signs of man's touch upon the earth had been obscured by the passage of time and the slow creep of mother nature's steady, verdant advance. Lily pads grew freely in the shallows along the shore, heavily interspersed with tall, swaying cat-tail reeds, languidly stretching their dry brown stalks towards the sun. Berry bushes grew up in large thorny swathes around vast portions of it's vaguely oval circumference, strategically cleared in small patches to expose enough room for an eager fisher-person to step up to the edge and cast their bait and bobber onto the placid, murky green waters.

Stocked with bluegill, catfish and bass, a haven for legions of croaking bullfrogs chirping out their baritone love songs in unison chorus. Turtles proliferated there as well; sunning lazily on the shoreline or craning their leathery beaks above the surface of the water as if they were straining to catch a certain scent in the breeze. A profundity of dragonflies, butterflies and gnats fluttering softly, seemingly suspended within the hazy pollen filled sunbeams. Mosquitos were also present, of course, particularly in the evening hours after the sun started to set.

It was a place of much muck and mud and wild exuberant life bursting at the seams. Also, a place of much happy time spent with my father when he was most alive and in his element. My father himself was happy there in these moments. He was mostly patient, even, when indulging in this favorite pastime of his. The tolerance he seemed to lack so often in the rest of our lives, he pulled out in spades while fishing. I think that was because he just loved that his kids were there with him, doing something he enjoyed so much. He wanted to pass that love and passion onto us. To watch it blossom into the next generations to come. I get it. I show my kids musicals and old skit and stand-up comedy shows from the 80’s and 90’s.

We kids, possessed of the short attention spans of youth, would fish half the time and split the rest of the time between exploring the grassy crumbling banks or catching the giant brown grasshoppers that flourished and hopped in the scrubby field that surrounded the pond. My mother taught us how to tell where the catfish were in the water by looking for the rustling movements in the cat-tail stalks. Then she showed us how to simply dangle our bait in that spot in order to entice those fat, lazy aquatic beasties to bite. No casting even needed. They were dinosaur fish, those catfish; enormous and exciting to catch, even to a picky child who would later refuse to eat them. My father also taught us the intricacies of properly dressing a freshly caught fish. I loved this part, because it meant that I got to handle the sharp dressing knife; and I was good at it as well, earning high praise from my the person in my life whose compliments were in somewhat short supply at other times.

All of us were there, together, bound in a tightly knit bubble of joy; a precious crystal of time, accessible for all eternity in the permanence of my memories. I can still see our happy, sun baked faces in my mind’s eye. My brother, still young and innocent, vibrant and full of life. Long before mental illness and addiction reared it's ugly head and staked it's claim in him forever. My precious sister, long before life and circumstance firmly drove a wedge between us and then the plague of covid took her away from this world before that could ever be resolved. My father, long before I ever knew I would one day count my estrangement from him in decades. And my sweet, beautiful mother, long before I ever imagined it was even possible to navigate this rocky world without the warmth of her kind, guiding hands and steady, sure love. Fishing poles and worms, inflatable rafts and sunburns, laughter and sweet, bursting wild blackberries hot from the summer sun. Life was so simple and so perfect in those moments.

😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻😻

✨Hello my lovely readers! As always, thank you for blessing me with your valuable time and your invaluable attention. You are what sustains me in the midst of this current upheaval. Please be good to each other and to yourselves. There is so much pain in the world. Remember to celebrate the small, human joys and the magic that is inherent even in the most dimly illuminated places. You just have to look a little harder to find it. Find that magic, and then do your best to spread it around a little bit, folks. The world needs it now more than ever. ✨

If you can, please consider going paid. It is only $5 a month or $30 a year. It'll always be free to those who cannot afford to pay, however ☺️. If you would prefer to make a one time appreciation contribution to help support my writing, you may do so at:

💲PayPal: atxsupermom@gmail.com

💸OR💸

💲Cash App: $atxsupermom

Thank you again…bPNWc 😻