Fish. Pondering.

One of the most enjoyable and interesting presents anyone ever gave me was a resin-cast fieldstone water fountain that I coveted the first time I clapped eyes on it. It looks convincingly real, (not exactly as pictured) and sits about three feet high, with the water bubbling up at the back, dribbling and bubbling over five shelves of flat rock, and into a pool below. Lighting is optional, but it comes with a small underwater lamp that can be set anywhere you want.

The resident adult children gave it to me because they knew I’d buy it for myself sooner or later, and it’s been out on the deck for a couple of summers, burbling and throwing ever-changing reflections on the wall. I tricked it out with a timer, of course, so as not to keep the neighbors up too late.

When I was a kid, my dad had a clamshell pool in the back yard of the house I remember. The previous owner had scooped out the earth and laid in a layer of concrete, and finished the whole circumference with a twin border of small flagstones embedded on their ends. The space between these embellishments he filled with dirt, and planted hens-and-chickens. A walkway of flagstones surrounded the pool, and in it swam goldfish.

I believe my dad was the one who had to have a waterfall, so one was build of heavy flagstones and concrete at the middle of the back of the pool. But over time, and every spring, the shallow pool leaked. There being no reinforcement except perhaps a layer of sand underneath it, each heave of the soil would stress the pool, and the spring ritual involved cleaning and water-blasting the pool so that it could be patched and refilled.

Eventually, dad decided to replace the pool, so he called in a crew of some sort, to excavate and build a much bigger, less imaginatively-shaped rectangular pool with a heavy border. He wanted to raise waterlilies, which need about four feet of depth. In the center, he had them form the footings for a cement frog fountain (again, not exactly as pictured, but same idea).

Unfortunately, the crew that poured the pool did not have enough cement mixed to do the job in one pour, and when they came back the next day to finish, there was an imperfect bond along the back side. So the spring ritual involved cleaning and water-blasting the pool so that it could be patched and refilled. The fish always seemed grateful for being released from the confines of their winter aquarium in the basement.

Two years ago, I brought the resin fountain into the living room for the winter. It would have been more successful had not the presence of a small child tended to turn it into a water play area. The experiment has not been repeated. And last summer, I bought five plastic carp for the pool, because you have to have fish in a pond. The raccoons who feed at our patio stole one of the fish. We found it half buried in the soil along the fence line. Another fish had its lips bitten off.

So for now, the fountain sits out in the storage area beside our swimming pool. I cut the big picture of it off the carton and mounted it on our "office" wall, and I console myself with the thought that by the end of March, I might even be able to put it outdoors again. The surviving plastic fish will be very grateful.