Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010
You know, the lilypads in my Mom’s pond seem to survive better than most of the other flora and fauna she’s put in.
Mind you, she doesn’t take them in for the winter, and we do get cold enough to freeze the pond water at least a few inches down.
And this is the pond that has a slow leak that resists all the attempts at patching Mom has tried. It usually sits only half-filled, at best. Well, unless it’s rained recently, then it fills up a little.
Plus Mom’s health fluctuates a lot, and a lot of the past few years, she hasn’t felt up to much pond maintenance aside from a yearly mucking out and the occasional attempt to patch the leak. And that mucking out is mostly getting the massive amounts of fall leaves from the oak tree above the pond out of there, and she usually does it in the spring, so that pile of leaves spends upwards of six months sitting and soaking and getting really heavy.
The fish Mom adds tend to vanish over time, most likely with the assistance of the neighborhood cats. There’s a reason she doesn’t do fancy fish. She only got frogs once, and they’ve all hopped away. The snails vanished as well, at a slower pace. The water hyacinth is a virulent (but pretty) water weed, and that couldn’t handle the neglect. The cattails frequently come back, but are ragged and have to regrow from scratch anyway.
And then there’s the lilypads. We don’t always get flowers, mind you, but every spring a few curled leaves poke their way up through the water’s surface, facing the year bravely once again.
And when the flowers bloom, they bloom beautifully.
