For my brother and I it was the pond, or actually the ponds, across the road. They were an eleven acre cluster of old gravel pits that had filled with rainwater and irrigation runoff. We, our friends and many other local kids played and fished, built Huck Finn rafts and, occasionally, fought there. I would spend hours at the ponds, hunkered down in the brush watching waterfowl, osprey, muskrats and mink.
When I was around twelve, the property was sold and closed to the public. I remember the sense of loss that I felt upon losing my childhood paradise.
A decade or so later, when I was in college, the property sold again, to my dad. He spent the next several years hauling out trash and scrap metal (the place had been used as a dump by neighbors), planting hundreds of trees and excavating to combine two of the biggest ponds in to one. Wildlife that I had never encountered on the property as a kid, including deer, beavers and otters started showing up regularly.
A few years further along, I married a local girl and we bought six acres adjoining the pond property. My dad was diagnosed with cancer and as his health declined, I became the primary caretaker for the property.
My dad passed away in 2013. The property is still in the family. My son and my brother's daughters have free-reign to do what kids do in such a place. For the first twelve years of my son's life, we had no television or video games in the home. My son spent many evenings patrolling the ponds by foot or by boat with a spinning rod and a popper.
But I really knew that one wasn't mine because it had too much paint on it. Mine is skint up some...
