My Mother's Day Gift

You might ask why I would get a slingshot for Mother's Day. Living here in beautiful Northern California, we have acres of gardens and in the middle of our field, we have an abandoned pool from the years the kids were little. I have it filled with koi, and goldfish. It didn't start out that way, but, as things in my life have a way of doing, soon became the "big blue thing" I could see outside my kitchen window that got converted into something nicer. It's now one huge koi pond.

Life is indeed about taking lemons and making lemonade. The last thing I wanted to see was blue plastic in the middle of a meadow, but on the day we were going to remove it, it was filled with polliwogs--thousands of them. I knew that in time they would become little frogs. Over twenty years ago I brought 6 little green and yellow frogs from my garden in Sebastopol, let them loose near a natural pool and I've been serenaded by their ancestors all these years later. It just wasn't in my nature to destroy all these little lives. My husband had a different opinion about it all, but I won out.

But when summer came, and all the frogs had moved on and out of the pool, I got concerned about mosquito larvae. I bought some comets at a local fish store, and watched as they grew several inches that first year. I tried a couple tiny koi and the same thing happened. I put in water hyacinths and other water plants, added some minnows and then more koi.

Now they are having babies and I must have over 100.

My pond has defied all the odds. It is as green as moss. I don't clean it. I just put in bubblers, a little trickle of well water and feed the fish every other day in the summer. They eat about a Big Gulp's worth of pond sticks each feeding.

Their idyllic life started to change when we had a visitor. A great big Heron, almost five feet tall, decided this was his own private hunting ground. I watched in horror as he ate at least a dozen fish, some of them almost a foot long. I tried to get my dogs to notice, but the bird is smarter than they are.

But not smarter than my husband. So, for Mother's Day, I am armed and dangerous. And on a focused mission to protect the little eden I have created, by accident.

Happy Mother's Day from my garden to yours.