This Be the Place: A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

If I have been abandoned, I have also been an abandoner—not only of people, but of places. And I’ve wept for those places, particularly as a child.

One place I’ve wept for: our family’s pond, nestled at the bottom of a 10-acre spread in Goldvein, Virginia. A quarter-mile gravel drive wrapped the pond’s eastern side, which rested below our hilltop house. Poplar trees and red, white, and black oaks hemmed in the pond, adding to the feeling of closeness, especially when the thick summer heat rolled in.

I could blame my abandonment on my father’s military job, or my mother’s fight-or-flight instinct to move, or my growing up and leaving for college—but that would be to repeat family patterns of blame and excuse. Instead, I own that I left the pond. I left its quiet, sprawling blue self that asked nothing of me—that never screamed me awake or thumped my bedroom floor with a broom handle. Like the lilies of the field in the Book of Matthew, the pond did not toil, or spin (or weep, as I misremember the Bible verse). It simply lay open to the sky, the wild ducks, the Canadian geese passing by, and the long, elegant legs of the hunting heron. The pond held the logs with the sunbathing turtles, sliding in and out of its brown depths. In the winter, it iced over and became a milky still life, more so than any Dutch painting in a museum. In the summer, the pond was a riot: electric green duckweed crept in from its edges, frogs laid their clouds of eggs and circled through their tadpole lifecycles, and the sounds of the pond—oh, the stereo sounds: frog song, cicadas, crickets in the grasses. The trees circling the pond held the singers.

“The deeper the evening the louder the singing,” observes the listener in C.D. Wright’s poem “Ponds, In Love,” and I trust Wright for those lines (and for so many others). We are in a deep evening now; I was in a deep evening then. The pond and the pond’s singers—they exist, and sing.

Linda Gregg might call my pond a “resonant source,” a term she uses for places that are “present as essences. They operate invisibly as energy, equivalents, touchstones, amulets, buried seed, repositories, and catalysts.” These are the Ur-images of our creative psyches, that live with us and inform our writing. “If we opened people up,” remarked the filmmaker Agnès Varda, “we’d find landscapes.” Along with a Virginia creek and cornfields and the wood with its mayapples, this pond is inside me: as summer, as stillness, as childhood—as peace.

What I miss most about living in the country is the ability to step outside the house and be immediately alone—as much as I love my suburban neighbors Waverly, and Jesse with his dog Twinkie, and Carl and Gwen, and Annie and José. My family’s “neighborhood” in Virginia was a parcel of 40 acres and four houses. The only time the neighbors spoke was when we needed to put more gravel on the shared road, which was an endeavor, considering that many people move to the country to be left alone, or live there because it suits their temperament. Ours was not the wealthy country, not the country club or golf course country, not “horse country” or McMansion country, but the sticks: cedars and several kinds of oak trees and side roads that turned from pavement to gravel (and to mud, during rains) without warning.

But I was not alone—the pond was there for me: its unblinking, deep blue eye, its concentric circles of frog movement at the edges, its sometimes completely still surface. It was there and quiet when I was moving toward poetry at the close of high school, writing the worst poems in dollar-store notebooks as I sat by its edges—there when I walked through an ordinary door in our house and into a traumascape. The pond held a several-acre space (of tenderness, it seemed) when I did not know how much I needed a steady, abiding presence to be held for me.

***

You can not realize you are in despair, looking at a pond’s surface.

***

Ours was a natural pond, creek-fed and shaped to the land around it. It was neither a circle nor an oval, but had what I consider “horns,” and was a vision of asymmetry and imperfection. It was difficult to walk the perimeter, due to the horns and the way they jutted into the brambly woods—you were better off picking somewhere to sit, like Annie Dillard by Tinker Creek. I wish I had taken more photographs of the pond and its moods and weathers and lights, even though I know I contain them.

The queen Anne’s lace floated, lacelike, around the pond’s edges in the spring, its scent earthy and herbal when I broke a stem. The cornflowers grew like blue patience alongside the milkweed, the pollinators drifting past. One summer it was so hot, my younger brothers and sisters and I swam in the pond, our feet sinking into the silky bottom, the brown silt covering every hair on our arms, legs. We had an aluminum rowboat we would take out, and sometimes my brother fished.

But more than anything, the pond was a presence, a refuge of quiet from the house of mental illness and abuse, and I left it, walking into the liberal, English education I was warned against, while at the same time assured I could study anything, since I was “a girl” and wouldn’t have to “provide for a family.” I left the wild ducks and the copper sedge grass I loved and the sunshine filtering through, making the water green—and oh my heart, I miss it: the water, and the trees, and the sky above it. The way the pond mothered the creatures and plants and light around it—even the beavers, despite my haunted father and his rifle—the way it mothered me.

Life is survival and love and cost, and the pond gave of itself freely to me. In autumn, the red staghorn sumac and asters and goldenrod circled it like a crown. I’m sure they still do.