The pond is still frozen. The dog runs across it. She’s on patrol for deer and fox and soon, I think, black bear. The immediate forecast is for a healthy warmup. The ice will be gone shortly and the sunfish will rise to the top in small schools. I have yet to fix the dock. A dead ash fell on it. A broken mess. The oak dock is a fixture in the summer. My father and I and Rob built it forty years ago while the pumps were running to dig the pond. Two three-inch pumps ran constantly. We drove in eight-by-eight posts and built the dock and deck on top as the rest of the pond was dug, trench by trench, across the low field. By the time the excavation was finished, the pond was full of new spring-fed aqua blue water, cold, nutrient free and clear as a bell. The dock was squared, leveled, and oiled with linseed. For many years we lived on that dock. When my daughter returns home from the city, it’s the first place she goes with a chair and a book and, during breaks in her reading, she watches the dragon flies and fingering bass jumping. Or, if winter, she picks up her head from her book to catch a glimpse of the bluebirds in the brush along the bank, a heavy scarf around her neck. Soon we will irrigate the greenhouse from the pond and water the closest field of beans and potatoes.

 

That’s one project. Rebuild the dock. I will take a crowbar and pry up the oak boards and pull all the nails and remove the deck and then I will be able to repair the broken joists, the skeleton of the dock. The posts into the water are fine. These posts are twenty-four-footers and, when we first dug the pond, the water was fourteen feet deep off the front edge of the dock. It’s not these posts but everything else that needs to be fixed. I better call Doug over in Cornwall at his sawmill and order the new oak boards. Most of the decking can be reused but some will need replacement. None of this work is hard. It just takes time. Commitment. I will look forward to the day I finish painting a fresh coat of oil on what amounts to an outside summer living room. Maybe I will catch some fish while working and steam some largemouth bass with new potatoes and butter.

 

Work loads now all point towards getting the greenhouse into production and the firewood job has to be sorted out, the splitting and stacking done for next year’s fires, needs to be finished off and out of the way. Batteries charged and tire pressure checked and grease fittings greased, spring is actually here right now. It’s so exciting. This will be my 74th April. Each one -- I wonder if I can remember them all? I cannot. Some parts of our personal histories just blend and blur and become like a symbol. April is my birth month and like a symbol for me and tulips are my flower. I suppose I can count the number of new Aprils remaining for me on my fingers, one last time through, if lucky. If really lucky, add the thumbs.

 

Pointing towards growth, life quickens. But before planting the first potatoes, I’m off to Morocco. I don’t know a lot about Morocco, but have you read that the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils have been found there? Estimated at 314,000 years old, the bones and skull and jaws and stone tools were found in a buried cave in the mountains of Jebel Irhoud. It’s beginning to look like the Garden of Eden was a very big place and that groups of the human race may have evolved independently of other groups which would mean we are not all descended from the same two humans. I know, it’s complicated. But now add in the Neanderthals in Europe, and the Denisovans in Siberia, and Homo heidelbergenis, and the hobbits out in Indonesia, all humanoids, all of which, if they didn’t, could have interbred with Homo sapiens, and what was the world like? So big, so far away. Some of us carry their genes. They have all died out and we almost did too. Around 70,000 years ago, with the eruption of a super volcano in Toba, Indonesia, and the resulting drastic cooling of the planet, it is estimated that the number of surviving humans may have been as small as 1,000 to 10,000 worldwide. We were almost extinguished, like Homo neanderthalensis, like the rest of them. 

 

Well, here I am, and here I go. I will get to within three hours’ drive of that cave. Will it be close enough to create a loop in time?