Revisiting the Pond: The Era of the Koi Pond Ends?

Just a quick entry before I go to prepare my Sunday School lesson for tomorrow.

I woke up with the sun, even though today would have been a great Saturday morning to sleep in. The first thing I did was put on some shoes, grabbed the digital camera, and stepped out the front door to see what kind of early sunlight photos I could get from the pond (#5-7).

Steve confessed this week that he's thinking of letting the koi pond go. After all these years, possibly fifteen of them, he is ready to call it quits, and fill it in with dirt. Reclaim the yard.

I know why.

It's the maintenance required to keep it up. There are daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal maintenance jobs to make sure the koi have a healthy environment, a safe environment (free of winged predators). We can't go anywhere for more than a few days for fear that something can break down in the filtering/ pump process. It wouldn't take very long for the fish to do die if anything along the way of water maintenance were to break down. No one but my husband knows what to do and how to fix it.

The little square-like pond you see in the photo above is all that's left of what used to be a pond system three times larger. He buried two thirds of it last fall. I cried after he had shoveled in the last shovelful of dirt, sensing the great void that was left behind (#8-11). Even after the new grass grew back over the site of the pond, the shape of the ghost-pond remains, like a scar (photo#12).

The last photo in the series above shows how the koi pond looked in all its fine natural beauty two years ago.

And now he's talking about letting this remnant return to its natural state: a yard of grass. He compares the benefits: less yard work, easier to mow.

I can't talk him out of it. I wouldn't be able to maintain the pond myself if he became physically disabled or worse.

We both want to step away from the homeplace and travel one day soon, and cannot do so with the pond. At least we can take our two dogs with us on the road. But who can take care of a pond? Our friends and neighbors have offered, but we know the reality is that if something big happened, Steve would have to be here. He's the only one who knows what is hooked up to what, what needs to be running and how it looks and sounds when it is running correctly, how to dismantle the filter and clean it out, etc, etc.

So, as I hear him speak words of letting go, and as problems increase with the pond, and his patience and desire to keep it wane, I prepare myself for the end of an era. The era of our koi pond.

I think that is why I was outside this morning snapping more pictures. I don't know when he'll do it. This year, next year? I might come home one day, and he'll be standing in the empty hole shovelling in dirt. I know there will be great sadness, because he has loved the gifts of the pond even more than I. I know this because he has spent thousands of hours working on it, in it, around it, and sitting on the deck and falling asleep in the air chair.

I observed it, he built it. I took pictures of it, he maintained it. I told him what a fine pond he had made for us, but he had to figure out how to fix the pumps when they broke down, or what was causing the fish to die, or what caused the imbalance in pH and fix it. We both appreciated it, but he did all the work. God bless him!

Over the years, he has solved most of the pond's problems, lost sleep over it, spent lots of bucks on it, and now he's looking at downsizing. It's a great deal of physical labor, and he's not thirty years any longer!

Don't worry about the Koi, though. We'll make sure they find a good home. We have some neighbors who have real, natural ponds, and we can ask them if they would like our fish. We only have about thirty fish left, if that many. It shouldn't be too hard to find them a home.

Unless you would like them! And if you don't live too far away. Travel can stress them out terribly!