Sitting
by Donna Schoenkopf
I have finally had time and inclination to begin just sitting on the thirteen acres. I have owned it for three years and have never been able to just look at it. (Don’t ask.)
The land sits on two huge hills, with two creeks and a three-quarter acre pond. My building site is on the top of the farthest hill. This hill slopes gently, in three distinct plateaus, to a slurry pond.
I just found out it was a slurry pond.
What the hell is a slurry pond? It sounded ominous to me.
So I asked Peewee. He said it’s where they put the mud from the oil drilling that they must have done on your property.
Just mud? I ask.
Yes.
I am suspicious of this mud.
Peewee sees my look of suspicion ... so he tells me that an old black guy told him years ago that back in the day two black men with two mules would be paid a dollar a day to carve a slurry pond next to the oil drilling rigs. This would have been back in the ’20s or ’30s.
Two men, two mules, a dollar a day....
They were probably left hand mules, Peewee says. What’s a left hand mule? I ask. They go continually around and around a large circle, plowing with a special plow which turns the dirt out and away. They forever turn left. Only left.
Oh.
But in spite of its history of exploitation of man and beast and the befoulment of the environment, this place is spectacularly beautiful.
I sit here. No one’s around. I can vaguely hear a truck passing by out on Route 177, a quarter of a mile away. Mostly, I just hear the wind through the trees. And bird calls. Hawks. One came screaming out of the sky as I sat on a lawn chair on a cool afternoon on the top of the hill. She streaked past me, exactly at eye level, screeching. We were eye to eye. She was ferocious. I was shocked at the intensity of our contact.
A couple of days later I was (again) sitting on my lawn chair at the top of the hill on a slightly warmer day when a dragonfly zoomed through the air and stopped DIRECTLY in front of me and stared intently into my eyes. He totally checked me out. Then zoomed off.
The miniature frogs in the in the muddy pond are like jewels. Tiny little movements point out where they are. Exquisite.
Three days ago I put pond plants in the pond. I bought them at half price. I have a white lotus with large, round flat, floating leaves, taro, with its tall elephant ear leaves, purple irises, pennyworth, mint. And duckweed, luminously green, floats individually in tiny, round, green splotches, then gathers communally in free form circles on the surface of the pond. It’s like lace.
And three water hyacinths.
My lustrous leaved, purple blooming floating hyacinths will completely purify the water, making it crystal clear. They are the quintessential water purifying plant. When I (eventually) sit on top of my hill, looking down at the pond, I will see crystal clear water, a profusion of exotic plants and frogs sitting on lily pads.
I know water hyacinths multiply quickly, and are considered a pest by some, so I am going to pull some of them out of the pond if they get too profuse and use them for fertilizer. (There is nothing here but red clay, soil-wise.)
AND make baskets from their dried stems.
The water hyacinths will heal the pond.
Tra la la la la....
Two days later:
Now I come every day and walk down to the pond. The pond plants have been in the pond for five days. Every plant loves it here. The water hyacinths have floated to different parts of the pond. The water around them IS slightly clearer already. The lotus has rain water cupped in its leaves. The elephant ears have grown two inches, I swear, and the pennyworth and mint have grown, too.
There is so much to see and feel.
I saw a blue butterfly yesterday. Black, teal-gray-blue with art deco swirls. Its underwings had brilliant orange circles and slowly moved them as it sat inside a cage of brambles, then found its way out and fanned the air on the end of its spiky branch.
Strange beetles, HUGE ants, moss on forest rocks, billowy tall feathery white and lilac-colored wildflowers, ledges of red sandstone holding the soil against the earth. So many different kinds of dragonflies, long skinny blue sticks, fat orange buzzbombs, mating and carousing around the pond.
Sounds kinda poetic here, huh?
It is.
donna@fourstory.org
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