The Pond Nine Fathers Flooded

The window that January

I had stopped looking out the back of the house.

That is a thing nobody tells you about grief. It is not only the big rooms that close. It is the windows too.

Walt died in October. By the middle of January I had trained myself to walk from the kitchen to the mudroom without turning my head to the left, because to the left was the glass door, and through the glass door was the low back half of our lot, and that low back half was his.

For thirty-two winters it had been a skating pond. That January it was a blank white field, and I did not want to see it blank.

So I kept my eyes on the dishes, or the dog, or the floor.

Then one Tuesday night the dog would not settle.

Her name is Biscuit. She is a fat old beagle, and she does not get up for much after eight o’clock. But that night she stood at the back door with her ears up and made a sound in her chest I had not heard since the week Walt passed.

I thought it was a deer. We get deer in the yard.

I came to the glass expecting bare grass and a deer.

What I saw was headlights.

Three trucks were nosed up in the alley behind the fence with their beams pointed into the yard, and in that cone of light there were men. I counted them the way you count sheep when you cannot sleep, slow and twice to be sure. Nine. Nine men out on the low ground in the cold, bent over with snow shovels, scraping the old crust off the flat.

And one of them had the garden hose.

I knew that hose. It is a green hundred-footer that lives coiled on a hook in the mudroom, and Walt ran it out the mudroom window every winter for three decades. Somebody had run it out that window without asking, which they had every right to do, and now a young man was standing in the middle of the flat swinging it in long green loops, throwing water everywhere, the way you water tomatoes in July.

He was going to ruin it. I could see the ridges freezing up already where the water piled.

I stood at the glass a long while with my hand flat against the cold pane.

I had not planned to go out into that yard again all winter. I want to be honest about that. I had half decided I would let the whole thing go to grass in the spring and never flood it again, because it was his and he was gone and I did not think I had it in me.

But a man was ruining Walt’s pond with Walt’s hose, and some old thing in me would not sit still for that.

I put on Walt’s barn coat. It was the one by the door. It still smells like him, diesel and Lava soap, and I am not ready to wash it.

Then I went out.