Pond Reflections

We got back last night from a trip to visit my parents in Arkansas. I grew up in that little town and now that I am an adult I always wonder how much I must have taken it for granted to live in such a pretty place. I guess it's a grass is always greener sort of thing, but I figured it was better living in the city. Now that I've had a chance to try both, I disagree.

Not that you have to choose an extreme - afterall I grew up in a town so small there's still no stoplights and now I live in a town so big that flying over it at night looks like a sea of street lights. I'm not saying I want to move "off the paved road" necessarily, but being there really made me miss the space and peace of being somewhere so rural.

On the first or second day while we were there, I took the opportunity to check my email and the windows must have been open while I was on the computer because I heard so many many birds singing outside. I felt like I would really regret checking my email when I had the chance to go outside and just enjoy a beautiful spring day. And it was so beautiful. Usually when we leave Miami it's fall or winter and everything is brown, but being there in the springtime made everything vibrantly green.

Since I moved away, my dad had a pond dug (I guess that's the best verb to describe getting a pond) and Caleb loved it. I mean LOVED it. He helped feed the fish, but he also helped raise the water level by throwing in as many rocks as he could get his little chubby hands on. My aunt also has a pond (dug/build/installed? about the same time) and on the other side of my parents house. Caleb somehow associated that pond with throwing pinecones (of which my parents have an abundance). He would go out into the front yard and grab a couple of pinecones and head down the hill to the pond...with some adult chasing him.

We also rode in my dad's paddle boat.This is my aunt's pond - it is a little bigger.

As I said we didn't have these ponds when I was in living in Holly Springs and it is really amazing the amount of wildlife a pond adds to your neighborhood! They were just full of tadpoles and at night the air echoed with croaking. Everyone was fascinated by the ponds' reflective abilities. I went for a walk at dusk one night and they were even more mirror like. In the dark the water looked black, but the trees were shining in them. Very nice.

On the day we left, we went out to see some family friends who raise cattle. Caleb has recently started liking cows. (He says they say, "Mmmmm".) They were just regular cows - redish brown ones, think hamburgers - and I don't have any pictures, but it seemed funny to me that we went to see these beefy cows in the morning and by bed time we were driving on the Florida Turnpike headed for Mako. He was VERY glad to see us :)