This View Sees The Past and The Future

My best view is a place and a feeling all wrapped up into one.



It is a real place: a pond in Massachusetts where my grandmother lived just a few feet from the banks in her small one-bedroom house. I learned a lot of things here as a child: how a bullfrog sounds, what a sewing needle is (later learned these are really called damsel flies), how to dive, steer a canoe and know when a boy was flirting with me.



After my grandmother died, I moved into her small house and made it my own, a single working girl with her two cats, who wasn't afraid of the pitch-black nights, or the moon reflecting on the water, or the howling winds in a storm. In the summer, I'd wake up at 6am and swim before getting dressed, boarding a subway and making my way into the Boston noise. The feel of the pond would be on my skin all day, like a wonderful secret no one else knew.

When I had moved away to live with my future husband, my parents sold their home on the other side of the state and moved into this same home on the pond. I was married on the banks of the pond, overlooking that lovely water.



I brought my children there for their first summer swims, and now they are the ones who beg to feed the fish, to swim just a little longer, to look for baby turtles, just like I did so many years ago.



My grandmother, her brother, my father. . .they all lived here and are gone. But, they really aren't, not as long as I can still look out at the pond.

So, yes, it is a place. But it is also a feeling that I can summon at a moment's notice. It's a feeling of family, of friendship, of time's passing and the knowledge that I will always be a part of this place, and this view, long after I too am gone.



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This post, written along the theme of "My Best View", was written for Parent Bloggers Network to introduce Windex's new All-in-One glass cleaning tool.