The pond knew itself as man-made, a creature of its people. It held spring water, for a glassy moment, in arms of tight-seamed stone. Day after day, night after night, it kept its emerald eye wide open in the heart of town. Weeping willows, church spires, and the ancient grain mill crowded against its sandstone rim. Like eyelashes, they threw their sundial-shadows across the arc of hours, framed clouds and slow-track stars.
Through every season, the pond wept across its weir. Its tears washed dirt from clothes and souls. Century after century, siege after siege, pond water drove millstones that ground wheat and rye from city granaries. In peaceful years, on Sunday afternoons, parents and grandparents walked toddlers over cobblestones to toss stale bread to ducks and swans. The pond rippled, but it never blinked. It gazed skyward, steady through undulations, bread-splash, drifting down. Warm springs and salt springs kept its cornea clear through winter’s fiercest freeze. On quiet mornings and moonlit nights, when the birds slept on the little island, the pond threw true faces back at those who bent over the wall. Children, drunks, and lovers looked down and understood.
Then came the winter of no ducks or bread. The pond watched on and on through drums and torch parades, through marching boots and ugly shouts. It shivered under splintered glass from store displays. It shook with the rumble of trucks that hauled some of its people far away. It never blinked when fire dropped from sky. Then, detonations twisted and tore its stream, sent water into basements to suffocate and drown the people hiding there. The world went dark and cold and still. No children came. The pond lay motionless in star-struck frost. Filigreed cataracts crept in from shore. From beneath the frozen lid, tears kept their faithful flow. But sins had grown too great to wash away. The mill’s paddle wheel lay icicled and silent in the current; rats stole the last grains from the city’s stores.
After the thaw and many years, willows and church towers re-sprouted. The vee-shaped wakes of water birds returned. Parents and grandparents stand one step from the rim, press bread into small hands. The pond looks up through crumbs and feathers, rush and calm. When ducks and coots nap on the island late on sunny afternoons, children, just tall enough to bend over the wall, see their own faces, deep and green.
–
Catharina Coenen is a first-generation German immigrant to northwestern Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Her creative work addresses trans-generational effects of war. Her essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Southampton Review Online, Superstition Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Atticus Review, and elsewhere.