Meryl Grandy

In Little Places

We wake to a bright and sunny fall day and it seems a waste not to be outside.  The wind comes up before we can leave the house, not as bad as yesterday, but strong enough to cause me to carefully pick our trip.  We stop at the feral cat park to check on the big river, but the wind seems to be funneled into the valley and it looks to be too much work.  So, we head back up the hill to Mondo Pond.  It is a small pond, maybe three or four hundred yards across the long way.  It seems hardly worth putting the canoe in, except that it is so pretty with rounded bedrock islets scattered in the water surrounded by the deciduous brush and trees of a New England forest. 


We see several mallards, a coot, a pair of pied-billed grebes, and one greater yellow legs.  It is an entirely pleasant trip in the smallest of places.  We talk about how nice it would be to canoe through a long chain of these little ponds.  We imagine that there is such a place.

She tells me how glad she is to have her favorite paddle again, one that I made for her.  We paddle back and forth and round and round, along the shoreline and weaving through the islets until we've seen everything a dozen times from a dozen different directions.