It was the mating season of blacksnakes, in the dead, dry leaves of last year, all writhing, twisting loops and coils.

And spring vaulted into summer; summer slipped into fall, making cycles like the circles left on the face of the pond, where insects lighted, or the boy tossed a pebble out.

The cycles of the seasons were like the tracings left on the pond's banks by some high tides, when the rains swelled the pond to a fullness, later to recede. The boy on the bank followed some of the tide circles, then stopped to look at his image in the pond where he saw reflections of cedar trees and locust blooms, amid a blue sky, full of tiny, white sheep clouds, changing places and chasing each other.

But the boy was of the moment, like the blacksnakes curling and circling and twisting into hoops, and rolling among the dry leaves, to sometimes enter the pond itself and then stretch into long, black strings, which the boy looked at with interest.

Life in the pond was continuous. The boy picked up a mollusk shell from some pristine time. He whistled, and waiting briefly, received an answer. He put his toe into the water and watched the wrigglers skittle into mud covers. Once a huge white crane stood on one leg; both the boy and the pond stopped breathing to keep the rare and motionless beauty theirs.

A heart weed grew on a small promontory, jutting out a ways into the pond. The boy liked to chew on the heart weed, for the chewing produced much spittle. It amused him to see how far out on the pond he could spit. His white spit sat and floated like the tiny spittle of early morning dew spiders. Sometimes the boy could spit a long ways.

A female deer talked to her fawn up in the cedar thicket. The boy had never seen the deer, but he had seen tracks coming down to the pond's edge. Sometimes he had felt wide eyes upon him from the thicket. He wondered what it would be like to be a deer and live in a thicket. Eventually, he would find small tracks intermingled with larger ones when the doe brought her fawn down to drink.

The boy shook the dust from his trousers legs and thought about his peppermint patch. He could already feel the pungent bite of the mint on his lips, and he sniffed in the direction of the patch to try to pick up the sweet odor. But the air was saturated with the smell of mating blacksnakes and the locust blooms. He turned to walk in the direction of the peppermint patch.

From a shelter, the boy sometimes watched the heavy rainfalls of summer obscure the pond in dark straining streaks, and the boy was part of this. The storm was a fascination as it beat the face of the pond into angry wave caps, and the pond rose to meet the storm as if it were reaching long arms.

Sometimes the pond seemed to urge the boy to hurry. Twilight descended and it was an eerie light. The boy felt he should not ignore the prodding to hurry on toward something unknown.

The mystery of the pond held the boy and he became part of the pond. To say the mysterious fascination bewitched him like a woman could not be true, for the only woman he had known was his mother. Her soft bosom memories and the womb memories were of the essence of the pond, and he sank and floated pleasurably, first in the sky above and again in reflections in the depths of the pond.

His mother called him to dinner, and up the meandering path over the rocks he started climbing. Then he looked backward. He could hear the blacksnakes under the locust trees, as they swished and rolled in hoops and whirls, in the old dead leaves of another season.

He stopped to count the leaves of his holly tree. There were seven; last year there had been five. His grandmother had told him that when the slow-growing holly tree grew tall enough to shade him, he would die. But death was a long time off, and the boy's thoughts did not dwell on it. Nor could he think of the one red berry carried in the bill of some unknown bird and dropped there to begin the tiny wondrous seedling. He reached down and cupped the small holly in his hands. The two newest leaves were pale green with red edging. Next year there would be two more, to make nine. Death owned no part of him.

Some days in late summer the boy felt sorrow as if he had lost someone dear, but the sorrowful thoughts were brief moments. Indeed, they were only quivers, like the spring trilliums he had seen up on the cedar hill, whose petals dropped at the passing of a butterfly. The pond waited for the moments to pass, sitting blue and still.

Sometimes the boy circled the whole of the pond, walking all the way around it. With a stick he tried to hook and bend toward him some cattails he wanted to hold. But he could never bend them quite far enough to touch. He would give up and meander after the dragonfly, for it, too, circled the pond.

It was a season of many dragonflies when the pond became a mirror for the cattails and colored trees, until the hills of fall rose from its surface. The boy knocked a milkweed with a stick to dislodge a cloud of blue butterflies.

The dragonflies skipped and skimmered; the eye of a duck looked down from a mile high and saw a sunbeam reflected on the pond.

A boy and a dragonfly, some blue butterflies and a wild duck, each made his own minuscule circle, as life around the pond went on.

Throughout the season, the pond remained steady and still and intact, through the eyes of ten thousand springs and summer, mirroring the morning sunlight and each night the moon, in its different phases.

Some seasons were good for frogs. A dry season was good for birds.

The frog ushered in the springtime; a wild goose screamed, and little shock waves shivered over the surface of the pond, like fine wrinkles on a woman's face; the whippoorwill called out his season; the cicada called midsummer; and the mockingbird held a concert from the top of the same pine tree. When summers grew lazy, the hawk circled the blue sky above the pond. Once when a summer rain had washed clean even the air over the pond, the boy and a blue lizard looked at each other. The blue lizard looked from shoulders raised high on very human hands. Sounds broke their studied silence and caused the blue lizard to vanish, taking his hands back under the leaves.

With the cycle of seasons came the cycles of birth, of life, of death, for each of the creatures, as the book of life opened and closed around the pond.

Even in his dreams and nightmares, the boy was never far removed from the pond. Down to the pond, in the black night where the waters were black and white and the center of the pond swirled and gurgled black silver, and where the holly tree had grown into a giant tree, casting long black shadows in the waters, the boy was of the pond and the pond was one with the boy. He dreamed of a dark man on the bank, in the cedars, or in a boat, on the dark surging waters. Bad dreams became a coffin box which swirled in the center. As it swirled, it ended upwards to be enclosed and swallowed, engulfing the boy in the coffin. The dreams, the nightmares, the premonitions, the mysteries, intermingled with illusions and reality, were all in the vicissitudes of the pond.

The pond became part of the winter, too; ice covered the life that was buried in the mud. One small unfrozen hole in the middle of the pond told of warm waters rising somewhere deep in the earth.

The boy's father did not allow him to go out on the ice. Dry sinkholes nearby warned that suddenly bottoms fall out of ponds. The boy wondered: if he squeezed his eyes hard and then opened them, would the pond be gone?

Once the boy had seen a huge fish jump up high in the pond's center, though his father had told him the pond held no fish. But the boy had seen one, and was watchful.

The pond was a book of life with the boy as the learner. As he studied the dirty scum clinging to the pond's edge, the scum broke apart then came together again, with something teeming and alive. By reaching out a hand's length the boy could touch saw grasses. Ferns grew on the cool northern banks. Up the hill were the pines and higher up the inclines were the hardwood oaks. Here was the whole history, the whole life cycle of the plant kingdom, from algae through the hardwoods. The boy was part of all this, but it would be years before he would find it in a book. Here by the pond, the book of life was opened wide concerning the flowering time and the spreading of seed and the falling and bedding of leaves, and the boy was no intruder.

So suddenly it was spring again. The pond was surrounded by blooms and profuse flowering. The reflection in the pond was another world which received the boy gladly. There among the locust blooms and teeming algae, a boy was finding himself never in penury. Again the blacksnakes were writhing and twisting and mating, all in coils and circles, in the dead leaves from old dry years. The scents of the locust blooms and mating blacksnakes wafted in gentle circles to meet circles of peppermint over the breast of unfathomable waters, of the ever and forever Jake Pond.

©Copyright, Lou Crabtree