Life on Pitcher Pond

Magnificence at 6 a.m., here and gone again.

It is quiet this morning, as it always is and will be here on Pitcher Pond. I glance at my phone. It is 6:00. From the hall, Cort gently lifts the old-fashioned latch on the bedroom door, but I am already getting up. He’s getting his fleece jacket. “I’m going outside to take photos,” he says. “You have to see this.” 

I pull the thin grey curtains aside. On the pond, fog rises spectacularly off the water, the slight rays of dawn illuminating its movement. I catch my breath. 

Cort leaves to take pictures and to try to catch a fish off the dock.

I see his silhouette, black against the water, and hurry into my own fleece. I step out onto the deck and snap photos, trying to capture the mystery and awe of a moment that will not last.

This particular moment — Cort casting his rod out over the water, the half-light, the columns of steam levitating off the pond, the reflections of the sky in the water — none of this has been here before, has ever appeared exactly this way before. Nor will it again. This knowledge, a joy with a shadow of sadness, enhances the moment. 

Ten minutes later, the sun rises, blazing, blinding. It lights up the opposite bank, the plastic swim floaties tied to our dock, the now yolk-yellow swimming platform still anchored on this first day of autumn off of our neighbor’s cottage. 

I hurry out again, trying to catch and hold yet another moment before it, too, is gone, transformed into whatever it will become next. 

This is truly what we have in life — moments to be noticed and captured in whatever way we can. Savored, or perhaps grieved, but felt. Over time, the accumulation of some of those moments become relationships with special people and places. Strings of moments, like pearls found within Maine’s rough oyster shells, become stories — the stories of our lives and the stories we investigate and those we tell. 

I am learning how to get the most out of life on this voyage of discovery — how to get the most out of the moments that shimmer and bead them on a string. That string reaches back before I was here, before all of us who are here now were here. Like peering into the morning fog, I can see, faintly, that this collection will continue to be strung with new pearls, new shimmering moments, after we are gone. 

Life is breathtaking.