Across from the driveway of my childhood home, in the corner of a cow pasture of my grandfather's dairy farm, was a pond. My grandfather had had it dug long before I was born to water his herd of dairy cows.
I was told that the pond originally was so deep that from the hill where my grandfather's barn stood, one could not see the bulldozer that was used to dig it. I recall seeing cows standing neck-deep in its waters to escape the flies during the hot days of summer, and they were not even to the middle, perhaps only a third of the way in.
My grandfather was particularly concerned that nothing be done to reduce the pond's proper function of watering his cows. Buddy Coomer, who lived across the road, and I were fond of throwing rocks high into the air so we could hear the THUNK! when they sliced into the water with hardly a ripple. (That sound was almost as thrilling to us as the PING! made when we threw rocks at the telephone lines and hit one of them!)
"Don't throw rocks in my pond, boys!" Pappaw would call to us from across the pasture when he saw us doing that. "You'll fill it up!" But boys being boys, we stopped only until he had disappeared into the house or barn, then we'd resume our play. That's what boys do--throw rocks.
That pond became a central feature of my childhood years, serving as everything from a fishing hole to an ocean for model ships to a baseball diamond's outfield "wall." But it also played a role as our family's personal weather station.
We didn't have Accu-Weather or the Weather Channel to tell us weeks in advance what the weather would be. We just looked out the kitchen or living room window at the pond and saw what the weather was in real time. That was all the information we needed.
If it was raining, we could see the little circles the raindrops made on the surface of the pond and knew to wear a raincoat. If it was windy, we saw the ripples on the surface and knew to wear a warm jacket. If it was cold--really cold--we saw the skim of ice forming on the surface and knew we'd better wear a warmer coat, a toboggan, and maybe even gloves.
Seldom did it get cold long enough for the pond to freeze to a depth sufficient to walk on it safely. When it did, our "skating" consisted of nothing more than shuffling our feet across the ice and pretending we were wearing skates. Those were accessories we saw only in storybooks. I never knew anyone who had an actual pair of skates. We once "played hockey" on the pond, using old tree branches as our sticks and old walnuts as our pucks.
Today, the pond has been filled in. The barn burned down years ago. The acres of cow pasture have been transformed into the backyards of a subdivision. No little boys catch stray fish that have washed from an overflowing pond following a heavy rainstorm. No youngsters race to the water's edge to fish out baseballs before they get waterlogged. But this "boy" still relives those days spent playing around the old pond.
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