My Retirement Party

I cannot resist a sign saying "Pond" with an arrow pointing the way; "pond" is one of my favorite words. It snowed yesterday, about two inches. It snowed four weeks ago, two inches. That is this winter's total snowfall. Today, a quartz-crystal, unworldly January day, about 31 degrees, I took my first real exploratory hike in many moons.

After months of calculations and arrangements today was the first day, after 50 years, I no longer have to work, although I will continue to work because I like it. So I'm not "retired," but merely began drawing on retirement savings, easing up a little. My feelings were quite new and mixed, as if this were not an end but a beginning. I phoned my sister to sort it out. She said God's timing is perfect.

"The money should be in your account at the end of the business day," the money man had said, music to my ears. Back at home, lunch. Then what? Ideally I'd give a party. Can't in a pandemic, and if you live on rural roads no guests will come to a party in January anyway. Yet I desired to do something special. Chose a hike at a once-familiar place not visited for more than a year, maybe two. Thought as I trekked about how a year from now I may fish in Missouri without a license. After half a mile of beaten trail mine were the only footprints in the snow. I saw the word "Pond" and the arrow and walked uphill to a pond with the sun thawing a thumbprint into its ballroom of ice.

It remained only to give myself a retirement gift. What I have (embarrassingly) wanted ever since somebody gave me an insanely delightful three-month subscription 20 years ago was a full subscription to Fruit of the Month Club. I couldn't think of any reason why this would be bad.

Secretponding

A spring day so intoxicating it sent me bushwhacking, off the path, in search of--I didn't know what, until I realized I wanted to hunt and collect secret ponds: either tiny dots on maps, or unmapped. This one's at Glassberg Conservation Area. Hard to get to; all around, cedar trees, which grew thickly, have been deliberately cut in order to conserve and restore the native oak and hickory forest.

Signs of Spring

The "secret pond" area below the cliffs, swampy at best, is LaBarque Creek floodplain, and the post-Christmas flood covered a great deal of it with sand, silt, and matted driftwood, and as I descended into my annual early-spring exploration of the area -- impassable because of mud in winter, and in summer and fall with the thorny shrubs, green and succulent, eager to rip your face off -- I didn't know whether to expect mud, water, drowned animals' bones, or what. I'd heard that the silt and sand might cover and suffocate this year's mushroom community. So I looked with hope for the Scarlet Cups (Sarcoscypha austriaca), always the first fungi of the year around here, at maximum about 5cm across. This is the only place on the property where this Sarcoscypha, with its white rickrack, grows. As usual the cups, although small, were hard to miss, fresh and vivid, growing on rotting fallen branches among last autumn's leaves. Spring is about a week early, but it couldn't come fast enough for us.

I had not spent a whole morning outside in months. I forgot what it was like to spend a  morning outside, and what a refreshment the air could be, and how pleasant the sun if I sat down and took it in, and the trees taller than I remembered. Hawks were calling; they're seeking mates right now. In the coming days I will get photos that will tell more of the post-flood story.

Video Visit: The Secret Pond

Two-minute video, narrated by Divine Bunbun, of the secret, intermittent pond below the silica cliff, a La Barque Creek floodplain area so loaded with briars, mud and vines that it is accessible only in late winter or early spring. The Secret Pond is the home of sweet spring peepers and summer skeeters, and is a watering place of all woodland creatures.

The Secret Pond

The Secret Pond below the cliff is accessible only when there's no greenery. Mid-April until November, briars and honeysuckle will tear your sleeves off, and maybe your face off, and the mud is like wet cookie dough and ankle-deep. Went down there today, while I still can. Beneath the cliff, although it was 60 degrees up top, I found the pondwater still frozen. See the picture for yourself. That's why I'm not hearing spring peepers yet.

Peepers (Pseudacris crucifer) are very common one-inch-long "chorus frogs." Only the males sing, thousands of them, all night every night, and it sounds like "sweet sweet"; some say it sounds like jingle bells. Occupying "semi-permanent wetlands" like the approximately-one-acre Secret Pond, their music is among the earliest and therefore most thrilling signs of spring.

One night a few years ago I was listening to them with a friend and said, "I wonder what they are saying." My friend knew: "They're saying: Love me. Love me."