The Pond is gone.

Looking out over the deck, the sight is seriously somber. Where yesterday lay a serene pond in our front yard, swirling with gold, red, and black and white koi, now gapes a big rectangular hole of red dirt.

It's how it all began seventeen years ago. I had to find the video I had made of that day, when Steve began to dig a hole in the front yard, to verify the actual date. I asked him today, after I came home from school, how long ago had he first built the pond? He said he thought it had been twenty years. "I'll find out. I remember I video taped it."

It took me only a minute to find the exact video cassette, number 21, using the organization system I had created back when I was a stay-at-home mom at the time, and had time for being more organized than I am now.

Tape 21 also features my son practicing baseball hits in the backyard (he was 11 yrs old) with his friends Scottie and Josh, and our neighbor's little daughter jumping on a rebounder behind the catching net; footage of a young chickadee family leaving their nest hanging from a tree in our yard; and our friend Kathy teaching Steven how to dance a slow dance a few days before his 5th grade Celebration end of the Year dance. 

While the family of chickadee chicks above our heads took their first leaps from the birdhouse hanging from the tree limb (I had videoed that event as well), Steve spread the liner, a neighbor's discarded swimming pool liner profusely cleaned and rinsed with clear water, then piled up the rocks around the base of the pond. In those early days, he knew that swimming pool liners were probably not the best choice for a pond liner, but in 1989 there wasn't much water gardening going on, not many advisors to talk to about it.

There wasn't the plethora of information about building one's own fish pond as there is now. We didn't have a computer or internet access back then. No one we knew did. We thought having a video camera and a cd player made us technologically advanced (Imagine, no DVD player, no digital camera, no cell phones either, and certainly we never even dreamed about laptops back then!). My, how technologically ignorant we really were.

So, the pond began, a small, roundish, three-foot deep hole in the ground, lined with a white swimming pool liner, on May 12, 1989.

At first, only water filled the basin, but after a few weeks, Steve began to add the fish. Little goldfish he had bought at K-Mart (there was no Wal-Mart in our county back then). The cheap kind. It was believed that if the experiment failed, at least he didn't have a lot of money invested in the fish.

When the fish proved they could survive, and seemed to be thriving, he decided that he should make the pond bigger, and use a proper liner. He bought a pvc material liner for the first remodeling. Years later, he replaced it with a proper rubber liner, one that wouldn't become brittle with age. Each time he replaced the liner, he enlarged the hole, or maybe it was the other way around. I don't remember.

It soon looked as long and wide as my friend's swimming pool, though not as deep. Our pond's deepest depth was about 4 feet. In the process of enlarging the pond, he also created a bog for bog plants (the irises and cattails love the bog), and a  terrace-like three pond arrangement to enhance the water filtering system. A few years ago, he learned about black light filtering, and bought one. They're expensive. He installed it, and that was indeed a good move toward keeping the water free of the bacteria and algae that had been removing oxygen from the water.

Some of the things he did to the pond over the years include: trying to find the ideal balance of conditions for the fish. He planted trees to provide shade, then had to cut down others so it could get more sunlight. He had to cut the side walls down straight to prevent herons from killing the fish (they like sloping shallow sides), and rebuilt the pump system at least three times, adding additional pumps, and larger ones to accommodate the increase in water volume and fish population. He tapped into an underground spring to bring in fresh water whenever he needed it so we wouldn't have to use our own well water when the pond water level was low. He's added chemicals to stop a fish disease that was claiming them one year, and has culled hundreds of minnows over the years to prevent over population. One thing he has never done in this pond, though, is to fish in it!

The pictures above show what the pond looked like today when I came home, and for comparison, what it looked like just last week, and last year. Just for comparison.