The Pond

Mike, from the National Writing Project of Central Arkansas, (and who is not my cousin) came to our institute on Monday and led us in some great writing exercises.

One was to draw a map of where we grew up and then mark places where interesting things happened. Then write about one or more interesting places.

These are the assignments that I never try, because I cannot imagine them working, but I felt compelled to play along, since I had invited him and I was in charge (at least nominally) of the institute.

Anyway, this is what I wrote about...

The pond was forbidden. Partly because it was nasty. I mean, we could see the cows standing in it, so we knew it was foul. The other reason is that my mother and my grandmother both had a deep abiding terror of us drowning.

Of course, that made it all the more interesting.

On the whole hilltop, my brother and I were the only kids. In the days before VCRs and satellite tv, boredom was our constant enemy. My cousin, Mike -- his parents called him Julio for some reason I could never fathom-- occasionally came over to our grandparents' house. We lived for these visits. Mike was an expert at keeping boredom at bay.

So when he came over, us kids would go outside and play. Some places, of course, were off limits. Off limits were the chicken house, the "smoke house," the garden, the haybarn, the hog barn, the old barn and the pond. Those were places where work was done-- except the old barn and the pond. They were just dangerous. Work, or anything resembling work, we were content to avoid.

Danger was another matter.

We used to sneak over to the old barn. It was built in the 19th century, about the same time my Granny's house was built. The barn lost its roof to one of the very few wind storms that we had in the Ozarks back when I was too young to wander the farm by myself. We weren't, however, stupid-- just daring. We stuck to the log pens where the roof was totally gone rather than where the roof was only partially gone. But my grandpa still scolded us every time he caught us there.

The pond was also forbidden. It was spring fed, so it always had water in it. The spring wasn't big enough to cause the water to move a lot. Still, the orange water beckoned us. We knew that we would be beaten if we were caught playing in the water, tempting as that was on an un-airconditioned July day in Arkansas. So instead we haunted the edges.

One summer, we had enough of a drought that Mike decided that we could get to the stump that was in the pond. This was no ordinary stump, you understand, but a giant stump that was the remains of an ancient tree. It was not intact, but instead had a multitude of levels supported by gigantic roots suspending it as an island in the pond.

We wanted to conquer that stump. It was just big enough for the three of us to sit on it. So we waited until the grown-ups were busy talking about who had the best tomatoes on the creek and what calves might be selling for in the fall to head out for the pond to make that stump into our domain.

We stood by the edge of the pond. There was a rock positioned fortuitously between the shore and the stump. If we could just stretch our legs out far enough, we could catch that rock and jump over to the stump. Mike and I were not quite sure that we could do it, so we put my little brother up to trying. Craig would do anything to win our approval, so he blithely bounced over. Mike and I followed.

Everything we talked about sitting on that stump, every stupid game we played crackled with the excitement of sitting on our perch that was both surrounded by the pond and above it. We did this every time Mike came over that summer.

Until, of course, our grandfather caught us. Our pleas that we were in no danger went unheeded. We were supervised for the rest of the summer.

And so boredom defeated us. That summer.

There are details here that I made up, but the pond, the stump, and the barns were real.