Our house of the last fourteen years came with a blessing and a curse called a koi pond. Within the first week, the curse part was working overtime, in that we discovered that the pond was being run by an ancient sump pump. The pond was murky, green with algae, having been built in an area of our yard that was the worst possible location: full sun.
We ordered a new pump; I installed it and hoped the pond would start moving the water and the algae would go away. The next morning, when I came out to see how the pond was doing, I noticed the water had changed colors from a pea soup color to a weird orangish hue. I thought this was a weird color to see in a pond, and even weirder that the orange-ness was shifting about, almost like the water was moving beneath the surface. That shiftiness turned out to be three hundred goldfish which over years of neglect, had been left to breed and were now creating an almost solid orange environment.
Since that time, we have managed to correct the Ph, cart off the excess fish, get the waterfall to work and seen everything from fox to blue heron make regular visits, all this is in the heart of an urban setting. However, one of the most frequent visitors to the pond is my grandson Cash, who loves to feed the fish and unearth whatever might be lurking between the rocks and tall irises around the watery edges. While flipping through the many pictures we have taken of him at the pond, I abruptly had a remembrance of a drawing I did, over fifty years prior, of a child kneeling similar to one of the photos we had taken.
Both the photo and the drawing are shown here for comparison. A bit eerie, isn’t it? The actual drawing still hangs in a prominent place in my dad’s work-out room. Who would know that over fifty years later, I would have a grandson poised just like the drawing, complete with a fish net!
The colored pencil drawing, executed when I was eleven or twelve, was part of an advertisement on the back of a National Geographic magazine that caught my attention. I remember having a lot of trouble managing the background by blending the colored pencils. At that age, I did not understand that things in the foreground are in focus, and that my background was not going to look realistic because it would be out of focus. That is what happens, of course to things that are further away, but I did not have that knowledge then.
Yesterday, just as we were posting these dual pictures, I looked up to see Cash standing in the pond. Now, here at the Bender’s we have a strict rule about four-year-old’s getting into a pond. We put his clothes in the dryer and put him in a five-minute time-out, wrapped in a towel in the warm sun. Glancing over at him in his lawn chair, I tried to keep a stern grandpa face, the one that says, “I’m serious about this rule.” Still, I had to laugh inside, knowing that there was a boy just like him in a picture in a frame that has been kneeling by the water’s edge for over fifty years, perfectly safe, carefully picking through what discoveries he might find in his tiny fish net.
He is learning about nature on a level lost to most of us, peering with intense curiosity at the mysteries pond life may reveal. I am learning that time moves forward, and that God’s hand is in every detail, down to the last mark of a colored pencil.