10 Minute Walk: Dry Pond

For at least our first decade in the hollow, we had a nice little spring-fed pond up on the side of the hill. It wasn’t much of a pond, but it always held water and every year like clockwork a pair of ducks came and nested. Then a multiyear drought hit us, the worst in the Arkansas Ozarks since the dustbowl, and the pond slowly disappeared. If ducks came to nest, they did not stay. Today I stood in the bottom of the dry pond and lamentations filled my mind.