A garden should have pond in it, thought Mary Ann as she dug into the rich earth in the farthest corner of her backyard. Or at least a water feature of some kind. But hers was going to be a little pond, with a tiny waterfall and some water plants and maybe even a fish or two. For years she had wanted one, but since she was blessed with the loving companionship of a pair of Labrador Retrievers, she had never quite had the courage to put one in. The labs would consider it their private swimming pool and it would be lost to all other uses. Moses, named for his penchant for lying in the shallows in the reedy part of ponds, and Gerry, short for Geranium because he loved to eat them, would do nothing but play in the water and then get it all over the house. They never understood why Mary Ann objected to wet dogs in the house or got upset about their lovely muddy footprints on the floor.
Finally, this year, she had put up new fencing and made an “adult humans only” part of the yard, where she had planted lots of flowers and set up a bench swing and a wicker table with chairs - all the things that she hadn’t quite dared to have before because the labs saw everything as a toy - preferable a chew toy. Since she loved her dogs, she had always compromised and had a shared yard with some hardy outdoor people furniture and lots of dog toys. But now, with the yard divided in half, she could have her yard and they could have theirs. Her yard would be by invitation only (and only with heavy supervision) for the labs.
Mary Ann hummed happily under her breath as she made the pit that would be lined, decorated with rocks, filled with water, and adorned with plants over the next few weeks. Finally, with blisters forming on her hands she finished digging the hole to just the right size and shape and leaned on her shovel with satisfaction. The dogs, pinned into their half of the yard, looked through the gaps in the fence and sniffed loudly. They could smell the fresh- turned earth and clearly wondered why Mary Ann wasn’t letting them help with the excavation. They loved to dig holes.
“Not this time, fellows,” she called back to them, and went to put the shovel away and drool over water plant brochures as she ate her dinner. She would appease the dogs with a long session of fetch the tennis ball after dinner.
The next day after work, Mary Ann went out with a roll of chicken wire to start reinforcing the little pool. Strangely enough, she found about two inches of muddy water in the bottom of it. Deciding it was probably run off from a badly aimed sprinkler in her neighbor’s yard, she bailed out what she could and partially covered the hole so it wouldn’t fill up again tomorrow. After it dried out, she would start lining it.
The next day she did not start lining the pond. It was quite full of water, but then so were her yard and all of the neighbors’ yards too. A water main had broken in the alley and everything for a block was wet. The labs had a great time splashing in the water that ran into the yard. Mary Ann used up most of her spare bath towels drying them off before they came into the house for the evening.
The day after that the ground was still soaked and the pond hole still had water standing in the bottom of it. The labs were apparently inspired by the soft muddy earth and dug a hole under the fence from their part of the yard to hers. They spent the afternoon playing in the muddy pool and dug it out a little bit more for her, sculpting the shape into something they seemed to think was more appropriate for a Labrador swimming pool.
Mary Ann growled at them as she scrubbed them off and toweled them dry once more. Then she shut them in the house and called a few friends over for a barbeque-and-line-the-dog-yard-with-buried-chicken-wire-under-the-fence party. Her friends laughed and came and by the end of the week, the dogs were safely jailed in their own part of the yard again.
All week long, the hole had kept water in it. Mary Ann wondered if it was a side effect of the water main break, which was still being fixed because when one break had been repaired, another one had occurred a short ways away. The second one hadn’t flooded the yard, but the alley had gotten wet and the ground was pretty saturated.
Finally, after another week and a lot of very hot sunshine, the hole was dry enough. Since Mary Ann decided that she like the redesign provided by the dogs, she had had to purchase more materials, but finally she was ready to line the pond and put the little waterfall into place. The series of water main breaks (they were on the fourth one) had moved farther down the alley, so the area should stay nice and dry while she worked.
A few days later, she was ready to fill her little pond with its rocky surround. The dogs peered at her with great interest as Mary Ann got out their friend and favorite toy, the water hose/ giant-snake-to-kill and filled the pond. Then she flipped a switch and the waterfall sprang to life. Mary Ann beamed with pleasure and made plans to pick up her new water plants at the nursery on the way home from work tomorrow.
Because she stopped at the nursery, Mary Ann was late getting home the next day. Immediately she saw that the planting of the water plants was not meant to be that day. Moses, who was the mechanical genius of Labradordom, had managed to knock the lock on the gate open. Both dogs were happily enjoying the new pond when she found them. Moses was lying in the shallow part, panting happily, and Gerry was playing bubble with his nose in the water while searching for a rock on the bottom, his tail whipping back and forth the entire time. They both started guiltily when they saw - and heard - Mary Ann come into the back yard.
She removed the culprits, fixed the rock surround, removed various toys and foreign objects donated by the labs from the pond, and then went to the hardware store for a latch that locked. Moses hadn’t figured those out yet. Finally, she took the dogs to a nearby lake so they could play in the water without destroying her pond.
As she fell asleep that night, with the gentle snores of the Labradors coming from their dog beds, Mary Ann thought, “Tomorrow. I should be able to get those plants in tomorrow. After all, what else could go wrong?”
Surprisingly, nothing else did go wrong. The plants were settled in, and a week later, Mary Ann added a few gold fish. She began sitting out beside it in the evenings after she walked the dogs and enjoying the gentle sound of the little waterfall. It was just as well that she could only be out there in the evenings, because all day the alley was filled with the sound of heavy machinery. The water main was up to eight breaks now, just in that alley. It was strange.
One day when Mary Ann came home, though, her little pond was not as it should be. About half of the water was splashed out, and a couple of plants were uprooted. The little goldfish were hiding in the rocks under the waterfall. Mary Ann was puzzled. It looked like the damage the dogs would do, but they were securely behind their own fence. They were dry and obviously innocent, for once. Finally she decided that some wild animal, like a raccoon or something, must have gotten into the yard. It didn’t really work and she knew it, but she really couldn’t imagine what else it could be.
But the same thing happened the next day, and the next. Mary Ann was getting really annoyed and wondered if the dogs weren’t escaping during the day, early enough to dry off again and a neighbor was putting them back. She asked, but all of her neighbors worked all day, and had no idea what she was talking about. The men working in the alley looked at her like she was nuts. They had enough problems with the water lines without worrying about someone’s dogs.
One day she did come home early and found the dogs in the pond. This just reinforced the idea that somehow it was the dogs, although they hadn’t uprooted any of the plants or splashed out much water at all.
It was strange, though, because the latch on the gate was open and Moses had never worked one of those latched before. Maybe he just got lucky, she decided.
The next day, Mary Ann made certain that the gate was unopenable by the dogs and put a tarp over the pond. The pond was supposed to be relaxing, but since she had made it, it had been anything but relaxing. Between the daily damage to the pond and the water main fiasco in the alley (the repaired places had begun springing new leaks), things were not relaxing but instead were interesting. Mary Ann was tired of interesting. She wanted boring and relaxing.
She put the dogs on their leashes and took them for a walk in the park several blocks away. She noticed that the little stream there which was fed by springs bubbling up from deep within the earth was larger than before and then remembered reading in the paper that several more springs had surfaced upstream and had added to the flow of the little brook. Mary Ann decided that this was nice - the stream actually looked like something larger than the flow from a garden hose now.
She walked the dogs home and had to wade through the latest break in the water lines at the mouth of the alley. It had formed a giant pool and was almost ready to start flooding nearby yards. The dogs splashed through it happily, stopping to sniff and wag at something near where the water was welling up. Mary Ann pulled them back, fearing that they would fall into a hole made by the water. The dogs whined and pulled back, but Mary Ann was firm and they continued on home.
The next day, the pool was fine, but the day after that it was vandalized again. Mary Ann was starting to notice a pattern - on days when there was a lot of water from a water main break, her pond was fine. When the water main was sound (which was less and less often) her little water feature was disturbed. The whole thing was very troubling.
And the dogs were acting strange, too. They spent a lot of time whining at the fence and seemed very tired in the afternoons these days. One day Mary Ann shut them in the garage to see what would happen. She regretted that. Gerry turned his enthusiasm for eating flowers into a new skill of eating at the door frame, trying to get loose. He had never done that before. Mary Ann invested in some chew-stopping bitter apple, but Gerry didn’t chew anything else as long as she left them in the dog yard or in the front part of the house where they couldn’t see or hear things from the back yard or alley. Things were definitely strange.
One day, things got stranger still. Mary Ann got off work early one day to run some errands and realized that she had left her purse at home. When she ran by the house to get it, she just parked in front of the house, not bothering with the driveway since she was just running in. If she didn’t pull in the dogs might not notice her and get all riled up thinking she was home for the day. When she got into the house, she thought she could hear a voice from the backyard as well as the sound of the dogs playing in her part of the yard instead of theirs. “Finally -I’m going to find out what’s going one!” she muttered to herself, creeping over to a window. There in the yard, playing in and around the pool were both of her labs and a beautiful young woman. The young woman was laughing and splashing at the dogs as they all hopped in and out of the pool. The dogs were barking merrily, tails wagging full force.
Mary Ann was enraged. She went to the back door and opened it very quietly and carefully. It opened into the doggy part of the yard and was hidden from the view of the pond. She tiptoed over to the open gate and then stepped through it.
“What do you think you are doing?” she shouted in an irate voice. “This is my yard, my pond and my dogs! You are trespassing!”
The dogs stopped. The young woman stopped. The dogs tucked their tails and slunk over to Mary Ann’s feet, where they sat down, leaning against her in apology and effectively pinning her in place. The young woman, who had been standing there open mouthed beside the pool closed her mouth and turned. Mary Ann tried to move towards her, but the dogs were in the way. The woman looked back at Mary Ann and then dove into the pond - the very shallow pond. And she was gone.
Mary Ann untangled herself from the dogs and ran over to the edge. Picking up a stick, she poked it into the now muddy waters. The only things there were the rocks and the plants. Mary Ann had taken out the remaining goldfish long ago.
Stunned, Mary Ann sat down in the chair she kept by the pool and stared at it. She had to be imagining things. She had to be. The dogs whined and sniffed at the water. Mary Ann pulled them back. She didn’t know what was going on, and she didn’t want the dogs anywhere near it. They sat there like that for an hour or more and the then something tickled at the back of Mary Ann’s brain. She grabbed the dogs by the collars and dragged them into the house. She went straight to the computer. A little while later, Mary Ann looked at the dogs, smiled and said, “Well boys, I never would have believed it, but I think we have a naiad infestation.” It was a strange thing to say, but it made a strange sort of sense. Naiads were the nymphs that lived in water. For weeks now, the water mains had been breaking like they had never broken before. And in between the breaks, her pond had been vandalized. And then Mary Ann realized with a jolt that it had all started when the underground springs had surfaced quite a distance away. They had probably gone right under this area before.
“And I think I know why she’s here, too,” Mary Ann told the dogs, who wagged and looked hopefully at her. If Mary Ann was talking to them, she might say the words treat, or ball, or walk, or dinner. They were ever hopeful.
Mary Ann walked purposefully towards the back yard. The dogs followed, thinking playtime might be in order. She grabbed her shovel and marched for her beloved pond.
Digging into the flower bed beside it, she started tossing shovel loads of dirt into the water. “I am not…having…something living…in my pond…that…I didn’t…put there!” she grunted as she filled in the pond.
As the pond filled up with the muddy topsoil, and the free standing water became less and less, something began to happen. The water that was left began swirling and moving around as if it were alive. Finally, when there was only about an inch left, Mary Ann stopped. She said, “All right, come on out. I know you’re in there, and if you don’t come out, I’m going to finish filling this in right now!”
The remaining water swirled and heaved, and then all of a sudden there was the lovely young woman standing there in the mud looking defiant and frightened all at once.
“Most folks would be glad to have a naiad living in their ponds!” Her voice was as smooth as water itself. The dogs whined and edged over to her, wagging ingratiatingly.
“Maybe if the naiad weren’t tearing up the pond and getting the dogs in trouble and causing water main breaks left and right, that might be true. As it is…” Mary Ann replied, staring at the naiad in wonder.
The naiad looked down and shrugged elegantly. “I do as I will. I am a figure of nature and I can’t be stopped.”
“I don’t care what you are, something from mythology or not. This is my pond you’ve been messing up, and my water supply you’ve been playing with!”
The naiad stared back at her. “My spring is gone, my friends have disappeared. Your pond was here, and the pipes that confine the water instead of letting it run freely, and your water dogs were happy to play with me so I won’t be so lonely. The pond was always fixed by the next day, so how was I to know you were unhappy?”
Mary Ann started to say something and stopped. The naiad made perfect sense. Her home was lost and she was lonely and here was everything she was looking for near where her home used to be.
Mary Ann looked at her carefully. “What would you say if I told you I could help you find your old spring? It doesn’t run underground anymore, but it is still nearby. I bet your friends went with it.”
The naiad looked at her suspiciously. “How are you going to accomplish this? How do I know you won’t dry me out or confine me?”
“I guess you’ll just have to trust me, won’t you,” said Mary Ann.
In the end, the naiad agreed to let Mary Ann try and Mary Ann hauled a bucket with the naiad in it over to the park and upstream to where the springs had surfaced. She got some funny looks from people as she walked by carrying a bucket full of water - towards the stream.
The naiad formed from the water in the bucket and stepped out beside the stream. Sticking one finger into the flowing water, she shook slightly and said, “Yes, this is my stream.” A finger that looked very like hers came up out of the water and touched her back. “And my friends and family are here.” She turned to Mary Ann. “Thank you. You have returned good for ill, and reunited me with my own kind. I will remember this.” Then she dove into the stream and disappeared.
Mary Ann went home to her dogs. That week the water mains stopped breaking, and Mary Ann dug out her little pond again and repopulated it with plants and fish. Then she went into the dog’s yard and dug them a little pond, too, which delighted them.
She noticed that her little pond stayed clear and clean and flourished, with none of the problems that little ponds are prone to, and that the dogs’ pond showed frequently showed signs of splashy games being played while she was out.
And sometimes in the evenings, if you looked in to Mary Ann’s yard, you would see her sitting in her chair by her little pond and talking with a beautiful young woman who was half in and half out of the water.
- She Wolf (c)2007
