The Pond

A post and the ensuing comments over on Lemming's site have thrown me into heavy reminiscence mode over a favorite childhood haunt.

Two blocks from my childhood home was a creek that fed into a duck pond which backed up to houses along one side and a golf course on the other. There were a couple of paths through the area, one which led from near my house to the main road, the second which led to the other side of the subdivision. Throughout my youth it was a favorite childhood haunt, in part because it offered everything you could want in childhood recreation and then some.

Officially, it's a local park, but other than a couple of paved trails it didn't really offer any amenities, so it felt like our own little wildlife preserve.

The most family-friendly area of the pond was, indeed, the pond. You'd take your stale bread down there to feed the ducks and the geese. If mom was at the bread outlet and find a super-steal, she might even buy a loaf of cheap bread with the express purpose of feeding the ducks. Those were some well-fed birds. The geese were really pushy, always honking at you DEMANDING bread. Once after going down to the park to feed the birds one of the geese followed us home. Up the trail, through a couple of blocks of suburban streets, he probably would have waddled right into the house if we let him. That was surreal.

In grade school we would often ride our bikes down the path that ran along the pond, out to the main street, to go to the little market on the corner to buy candy. At the time we knew it as "Bethany." I've since come to know it as "The Mad Greek Deli." It's a little hole in the wall dive that has great Greek food and fantabulous sandwiches. The guy who runs the place is quite the character, a loud Greek guy who will chastise you if you dare call his Greek fries jo-jos or try to order a mad Greek sandwich with substitutions. For a kid just wanting to get a kit-kat it could be a little scary and the goal would usually be to get in and out as fast as possible. Once on of my friends was brave enough to say, "Thank you" to him. His response was, I kid you not, "Thank you for thanking me and thanks for coming to Bethany." Man, were the rest of us kids jealous of that!

The other side of the pond from Bethany's was the creek that fed the pond (and the source of the initial reminiscence). There was a footbridge that crossed the creek at one spot and would take you to the golf course and the other, newer side of the subdivision. It was our own suburban variety of the train tracks, and I'm proud to say I lived on the wrong side of the tracks. However, a bit upstream from the footbridge the creek was hidden within the foliage, and across the creek were two fallen logs. One of the logs was large and high. The other was small and low. We'd run and climb across those logs all the time, and there was much exploring to be done.

Although memory-wise the best exploring was done in the open field next to the creek. In sixth grade a bunch of local boys were collecting garter snakes. I won major points for being a female that was willing to touch the snakes. Similar to the points I've gained in years since for being a female who likes to drink dark beer. Sweetie seems to think I'm a girly-girl, but girly-girls don't touch snakes when they're in 6th grade.

The other thing I remember about the pond is the plants. There were blackberry bushes EVERYWHERE. And because they weren't along a roadside, where they'd be covered with exhaust, or in an area where you had to be worried about chemicals and crap being sprayed on them, so in the summertime you could just fill buckets with blackberries without even trying. You just had to watch out for the berries on the lower branches, since the pond was also a popular place for walking the local dogs. And where there weren't blackberries there were clovers, which is what little girls in Oregon use to make chains since wild daisies don't grow in the area.

In addition to the fun times it was where we'd take the fish that went belly-up in the fishtank, it was where I broke up with my first boyfriend, and it was a good place to just go THINK. Really, every kid needs a pond near where the grow up.