Pond of Death

I grew up in the Southwest.  It’s hot there - a good summer day is 113 degrees or so.  There’s not much in the way of greenery apart from trees that everybody’s allergic to and cactii that nobody wants to touch.  My idea of interacting with water was taking a shower.  This is partly due to the fact that we were in a state of perpetual drought and partly because I spectacularly failed at swimming lessons.  But that’s another story.

Yet another concept I failed at spectacularly.

My whole life I grew up thinking of water as a glamorous, unattainable thing.  And at some point during my childhood when my grandmother became addicted to Home and Garden TV I discovered that people had ponds in their back yards.  Not just the uber filthy rich - normal people like us.
I immediately decided we needed a pond in our back yard.  I could sit by it on lazy afternoons, maybe put some fish in it.  Maybe teach my dog to swim since I had failed.  The possibilities were endless.  I knew from science and school that if you dug deep enough in the ground you’d hit water.  So I took a shovel, went into the back yard and started digging.  This was a long and slow process because, as I’ve mentioned, it was probably close to 113 out.  But still no water.  I started to despair.  At some point my uncle came out and said, “Whatcha doing kiddo?  Digging to China?”
China?  No that couldn’t be right.  If you dug down into the ground far enough you hit water.  Not China.  I sat down dejected, convinced that Unknown Chinese People had already used up all the water in the spot that I was digging.  And then my grandpa told me to fill in the hole before our dog fell in it and broke her back (this same phrase, strangely enough, put an end to many of my childhood adventures and I lived in mortal terror of breaking our dog’s back.  Again, this is another story).
So we didn’t get a pond.  I still never learned to swim but I continued to admire water.  Then I got married.  And one summer my husband got an idea that we should each write down one thing we want to accomplish for the summer on a list on the refrigerator.  The kids wanted to go play mini-golf and go to the obscenely overpriced fun center.  My husband wanted to go to a baseball game.  I don’t know what sort of delusion possessed me as I stood in front of the refrigerator, pen in hand but I scribbled down “Build a pond”.
“Cool!” said the kids.  I think they were having similar visions I had as a child of lazing by the pond, only thankfully we didn’t have a dog they could teach to swim.  “Can we talk about this?” said the husband.  I think he was having visions of having his yard turned into an aquatic war-zone.
But I persisted.  I picked a spot under the flowering pear tree that looked pretty and idyllic and was currently full of ugly useless rocks.  I went to Home Depot and bought a pond liner, a pump, and a remarkably tacky plastic waterfall.  And we drove out into the mountains and got some large rocks that we had planned to use in the design.  And after a few hours of hard work, a good deal of complaining, and one more trip to Home Depot because I hadn’t worked out the power for the pump in my excitement, I had a pond.
I was in heaven...I had a wonderful aquatic thing all to myself.  It was my pond of wonder and amazement.  Then the algae started growing.  My pond of wonder was suddenly a pond of stinkiness and greenness.  I researched online and discovered that you could allegedly control algae by putting barley in your pond.  So I did - and my pond went from having algae in it to having algae in it that was participating in an extended hay ride.  So I decided to get tough.  I bought enough chemicals to give every pool in every Olympic village ever built a shock treatment.  The algae went away but standing too near the pond also produced a peculiar burning sensation in the eyes, nose, and every other sensitive orifice.
And for awhile everything was peaceful.  Until one day I went home and discovered a tarantula had drowned in my pond.  I was horrified, partly because I had never seen a tarantula this far into the city but mostly because it was in my pond.  I’m not terribly fond of spiders, so deciding what to do with the expired arachnid took some thought.  I certainly didn’t want to touch it.  So I took a shovel with a very long handle and gently scooped it up.  It may have been the wind or my imagination but at this point I think the tarantula twitched.  I shrieked (which I’m not prone to doing) and jerked the shovel and the tarantula carcass sailed over the back wall into the neighbor’s yard.  I silently prayed that my neighbor wouldn’t go into his yard any time soon and if he did that he’d be astounded by the prey that the extremely large crows were dragging in.
Then came another period of relative peace wherein my pond returned to being a beautiful, idyllic, chemical filled oasis.  Then the kamikaze lizards arrived.  We’d always had lizards in our yard, but never any with suicidal tendencies.  Yet every day for almost a month I would come home to find a drowned lizard in my pond.  I was much less squeamish about the lizards, so they would be scooped gently into Walmart bags and thrown away.  I wasn’t pleased and began to think of ways to deter the lizards from meeting a horrible, chemical filled demise.  Apart from posting very tiny “No Diving” signs I was stumped.  Then the coup de grace came.  I went out to scoop out the day’s lizard and found a dead bird in my pond.  I’m very fond of small animals.  The lizards were on the borderline of upsetting, but the finch was too much.  

I vaguely remember Eddie Izzard doing a bit about a “Pond of Death” in his discussion of British films and that was exactly what I had created.  A Pond of Death.  My beautiful idyllic liquid thing was now a mechanism for murdering the neighborhood animals.  The tarantula had been worrisome.  The lizards disconcerting.  But an adorable, fluffy (strikeout) feathery thing?  This was too much.  I think somewhere in my mind I expected to come home and find puppies or bunnies floating in it next, although that was highly improbable.  I believe at this point, I called my husband in tears because I was convinced I had become some sort of genocidal pond owning maniac.
That winter we drained the pond and dug it out.  When we dumped it over in the grass we found the body count not only amounted to what I had previously found, but countless lizards, unidentifiable bugs, and the largest and ugliest slug I had ever seen.  I apologized to my husband for the gaping hole in his otherwise pristine yard and resolved to reduce my home beautification projects to things that wouldn’t result in mass murder.