The pond and the hammer

The pond was here before I was born freezing every fall before the winter and thawing every spring before the summer. The pond wasn’t always my friend, but it was always here. Sometimes I hated it, sometimes I loved it. The Pond was the reason I built the house on which the front porch, where I sit now, is attached. In the grass that grows between the house and the sand at the waters edge is where my children played and grew and carried away their things to start new lives. The maple tree that rises high above the Oaks that surround its base, is where I looked into her pale blue eyes and said I do. My life has been witnessed by the pond and it is all that I am.

I was young when I first came not knowing who I was with only a pack, a bed roll, and a desire to stay just a night. But the night turned into days and the days into years and the years into decades. I cut logs from trees, made mud from the earth to spread between the logs, and formed walls. I set windows from a factory across the river that were floated by barge and then carried by wagon to the ponds’ shores. I placed cedar shingles from a forest deep inside the Catskills one by one on the roof. A father, two uncles, and a brother came to drive nails and lay the stone that made the foundation. And when my home stood finished and my family had gone, I was alone again, but in another summer the girl from the farm where I bought two cows and a chicken would come to live. Her father would disapprove but still she would come. I would never be sure if it was me or the pond who first drew her away from her home.

In the stretched-out days of summer we swam in the ponds water and skated the ice that covered its surface in the cold haze of winter. We talked about the lives we would lead underneath the stars beside the glow of a warm fire. We made love in our bed until the early hours. We spent mornings drinking coffee on this same front porch looking at the tranquility of the pond. In my mind her voice is still calling to me. On my flesh her touch is still floating soft across my skin. She is everywhere I am and nowhere at once. I am a living aching of loss. In these days since she has gone my longing has grown to an ocean that dwarfs the pond.

It will not be long before I go to a place far away from the pond where I believe her spirit is. I am dying as I sit in a wooden rocking chair separated by a small table from the one where she sat. I have not told my children about the disease that ravages me. They would not come if I did. They will come after I am gone to separate my goods and take what they want. They will pound a wooden stake in the ground with a for sale sign and split the money when it comes in. I am not angry it is the nature of children to move on to raise their own families and forget the ones they leave. I know they have loved me. I know they have loved their mother, but they are gone across the country and this pond is only a memory for them of time gone by.

The bourbon in my hand was distilled half a century before. I have kept it buried away in my cellar for five decades, waiting. I didn’t know the occasion on which I would drink it, but this has proven to be the time when I would empty its contents. The taste is sweet as it goes down. The flavor has grown with age. Leaning back, I am feeling the effects of its more than three quarters of the bottle that I have already partaken. Old Music plays on an old stereo in the house behind the screen door I put up twenty-seven years ago. The lyrics are familiar. They are the ones we danced to on a thousand occasions alone in each other’s arms and other times when are kids laughed and giggled as spun if front of them.

“Give me your lips for just a moment

And my imagination will make that moment live

Give me what you alone can give,

A kiss to build a dream on”

I have watched the journey the pond takes every year from the flowers of spring to the heat of summer to the falling leaves of fall and finally to the frozen ice of winter. The spring flowers of my life are gone along with the heat of my summer. My leaves have fallen, and I am in the winter. My life is frozen with the pond, and I will not make it to the spring for my flowers to bloom again. Pushing with tired arms I Stand on rickety bones. With a weathered hand I reach down and grab the sledgehammer I have wielded at separate times for many years. The journey to the pond will not be long. The path is made of river stones I laid with my hands and there are not more than forty-five between the house and the pond.

The bitter cold embraces my face which is the only uncovered part of me the rest of my body is covered including my hands which are nestled inside fur lined gloves. I take slow methodical steps as I am weak from the fight my body has waged against what is killing me. In my mind I replay images of summer afternoons running in the wild grass playing referee in games of tag. Of picnic lunches under the shade of the Oaks. Of swimming lessons in the water of the pond. Of fish being pulled from beneath its surface. Of a happy life spent here.

The water of the pond is frozen thick and solid. There isn’t a need to test its surface I know it will hold my weight. With each foot I step out carefully purposely in turn first with one then the other. With my eyes I search the trees covering the mountainsides in the distant horizon as I close in on my journey's end. I whisper words, that are lost in the frigid wind blowing across the ice to my love, that I am coming home. The five pounds of the hammer at the end of the wooden handle drags behind me scraping across the ice. A hound dog named Holley howls from the property a mile down the road, and I wonder if his owners will be ones who will find what I will leave behind.

Standing in the middle of the pond I look out in all directions at the forest surrounding me. I listen to the wind blowing through the naked branches of the trees that create it. Holley howls again and I know he has caught the scent of something moving through the snow that covers the ground in a thick white blanket. It takes what strength I have left to raise the five-pound sledgehammer far above my head hesitating for a moment before I send it crashing down to the ice. There is a cracking sound as the head of the hammer sinks below the ice. Having to work it back and forth to pull it out I raise the hammer again and send it back to the ice once more. This time I do not have to work it back and forth before I raise it a third time and bring it down.

Tossing the hammer aside I look down at the widening hole in the ice. Lifting my head toward the winter clouds covering the sky I take in my last breaths. The air flows painfully in and out my lungs. My heart beats too fast in my chest and I think I may fall on the ice before I do what I have come here to. Closing my eyes wanting to leave in my way. I force my breath to slow, my heart to steady, and somehow in this moment I find peace. With a last deep breath my face still tilted toward the heavens I step forward into the ice and plunge below its surface.