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"In our neighborhood there is a walking path. We consider ourselves lucky to have such a thing, neatly paved with black tar like our driveways, cutting between Capes and Colonials and Saltboxes, through our own safe, scenic woods, circling the elementary school&amp;#039;s playing field, connecting one street with another. It is summer when we discover that someone has veered off the path and made one of their own leading up a wooded hill through wild blackberry and fern. Our children clamor for the adventure of the new path. We suspect teenagers, ferreting out their secret places to congregate, to do what we remember doing when we were their age, and we hesitate. We would feel obligated to put a stop to it, and no one wants to be, as Jane Filley says, &amp;quot;old Mrs. Brunner with her mothball breath and cranky threats,&amp;quot; who used to chase her and her friends out of their neighborhood woods. Maura Stahl is the first to try the path. Her children are 3 and 5 \u2014 Sylvia and Max \u2014 and she tells them to leave their bikes where the path diverges, which happens to be the Currys&amp;#039; backyard, close to the slate patio and the carefully arranged cast-iron furniture. Maura takes the children&amp;#039;s hands firmly in hers, even though Max protests that he can walk himself. It is midday. The heat dissolves in the cool woods. Maura allows Max to walk ahead, because as soon as they maneuver past the blackberry&amp;#039;s thorns they discover well-trodden dirt that leads up the hillside, mossy and speckled with sunlight. This dirt path curves through saplings and shade fragrant with pine. There are large boulders that appear to have tumbled down off a mountain that no longer exists, or emerged from the floor of the woods like something from the core of the earth, and she lets the children scramble on their surfaces, shows Max how with a small stone he can etch his name and his sister&amp;#039;s name boldly on the flat face. They walk for 10 minutes, &amp;quot;no more than that,&amp;quot; she tells us. And just when she thinks she will turn around she sees sunlight up ahead, and steps into a clearing \u2014 a flat sunny place filled with meadow grass and a pond. We are disbelieving, of course. &amp;quot;What sort of pond?&amp;quot; Jane Filley asks. Maura smiles. &amp;quot;Freshwater,&amp;quot; she tells us. &amp;quot;More like a swimming hole, fed by this beautiful running brook.&amp;quot; We are surrounded by Algonquian place names, those the early settlers of the 1670s must once have understood \u2014 Mashamoquet, Susquetonscut, Quinnatisset; big fish place, place of red ledges, little long river. These now signify parks and country clubs and shopping plazas. The idea of an actual brook, and a pond of all things, shouldn&amp;#039;t be too hard for us to accept. And still we cannot believe it until someone catches Maura heading up the path with folding beach chairs and a canvas tote stuffed with towels. &amp;quot;Do you think she is letting them swim?&amp;quot; we ask one another. &amp;quot;Aren&amp;#039;t there leeches? Snakes? Actual fish?&amp;quot; Soon others go and are spotted returning, the children&amp;#039;s faces suntanned and serene. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s so peaceful,&amp;quot; they proclaim. &amp;quot;The birds flit around. The kids splash in the brook and catch frogs. They swim in the shallows.&amp;quot; Some of the mothers swim themselves \u2014 the water ice-cold and clear. &amp;quot;You can see the sandy bottom. The little fish. We bring lunch,&amp;quot; they tell us. &amp;quot;We talk.&amp;quot; They explore the woods and find the remains of a homesite, the foundation stones sprung from their places by frost and spring thaw, by passing foxes and deer and clumsy hunters. Once this area was an open field, long before hickory and oak grew to fill it in. A family plowed and planted hills of rocky soil where our houses sit. The settlers had their own names for places: Mount Misery, Bare Hill, Hell Hollow. Someone mentions researching the site, but this idea is quickly discarded. We&amp;#039;ve heard about family gravesites and ghost legends from teenagers who seek them out on Halloween: the grave of the 2-year-old girl who died of diphtheria, whose grief-stricken mother saved the apple she&amp;#039;d eaten that held her little tooth prints; the woods haunted by screams of a Native-American woman murdered by British soldiers. We don&amp;#039;t want to know too much. Now at all times of day women tramp up and down the wooded path. Those with children who nap, those who&amp;#039;ve scheduled dentist appointments and music lessons, drag back early, the children angry and crying. We don&amp;#039;t worry about the Currys seeing women and children passing through their backyard, treading a path through their grass. The Currys&amp;#039; son, Michael, is college-age, off somewhere in Europe, someone&amp;#039;s heard. Both Walt and Kate Curry work in Hartford \u2014 Walt in insurance, Kate as an attorney. If she were home, she&amp;#039;d certainly notice us as she rinsed her dishes at the kitchen sink. Their house is a Colonial, one of the first built in the neighborhood. There are French doors leading out to the patio, and Jane Filley swears that one day she saw Kate standing there wearing an apron and yellow plastic gloves and smoking a cigarette. The door was cracked, and the smoke snaked out, a thin white cloud. &amp;quot;I could smell it,&amp;quot; Jane says. &amp;quot;She looked like my mother used to, standing there.&amp;quot; We all know what she means \u2014 our mothers with their hairspray and L&amp;#039;Air du Temps, with their bold print dresses, everyone back then reaching into coat pockets for their cigarettes the moment they came out of church \u2014 church being the only place they couldn&amp;#039;t smoke. We don&amp;#039;t know why Kate Curry is home during the day. We expect she will emerge now to order us off her property, and we consider the necessity of making another path, but only briefly. When Kate does make herself known, it isn&amp;#039;t in the way we expect. It is a Wednesday afternoon. Most of us have dinner planned \u2014 meat defrosting, vegetables already cut and placed in Tupperware, and so we linger. The children make a fort, towels draped over sticks. They build it on the sandy bank and play house, pretending to cook over a fire for their own imaginary families. Maura has remembered the bug spray, so we stay, lounging by the pond, watching the water striders skate across the surface where it is still and deep. Heading back we always feel what we&amp;#039;ve come to call the end-of-the-day sadness. A weightiness that arrives with summer. We are reminded of summers of our youth \u2014 the lawn cool in the mornings, the sun just coming up and a breeze moving the drapes of our bedrooms. Our fathers have gotten up and gone to work. Our mothers are talking to their mothers on the phone, or watering zinnias, or absently stirring their coffee, the clink of the spoons inside their cups a sound we now make ourselves. The whole day stretches before us, a luxury we feel each time we tread the path up to the pond and that depletes as the day draws to an end. Summer seemed interminable to us as children, but as adults we know otherwise. It is in this mood that we descend and emerge from the woods toting our bags and towels and assorted toys, the children singing something from television. We step onto freshly mown grass and meet Kate Curry. She wears a pair of shorts and a white sleeveless blouse. Her hair is pulled back in a neat ponytail. Around her eyes are the fine lines we notice on everyone but ourselves. She waves and invites us all inside. &amp;quot;For a snack,&amp;quot; she says. And then she squats down in front of our kids the way they tell you to do when you speak to them, and says, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;d like a snack, wouldn&amp;#039;t you? A Popsicle? An ice cream cup?&amp;quot; We thank her, but beg off. &amp;quot;So close to suppertime,&amp;quot; we say. But she knows the children will plead and make it impossible to drag them off. It isn&amp;#039;t that we don&amp;#039;t want to go into her house, but that we have our minds set on getting home, on taking our burden of unspoken sadness back to our own crumb-littered counters and sagging couch cushions, to the book we left open on our nightstand. But the children and Kate win out, and we all file through the French doors into her spotless kitchen. The children are shown the den and the television, where they can sit with their ice cream. Kelsey Simons asks for a place to change the baby, and Kate shows her the bathroom and then the place to put the sodden diaper after she is done. All of us seem to fill up Kate&amp;#039;s house. We sprawl at the kitchen table, and she offers us a drink \u2014 &amp;quot;Gin? Vodka?&amp;quot; \u2014 and we laugh, even though we sense it will offset the end-of-the-day feeling. And then Maura pipes up, her broad face rosy from the sun: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll take whatever you&amp;#039;ve got.&amp;quot; Now we always end the day at Kate&amp;#039;s. We tromp down and Kate is waiting, and the children get their Popsicles or pretzel sticks, and we get our sloe gin fizzes, or tequila sunrises, or Tom Collinses. Sometimes we sit in the yard on her rarely used cast-iron furniture, or in our folding chairs, the aluminum legs still covered with brook sand. Kate serves us all from a tray. She asks us about our day and where we&amp;#039;ll vacation, an inevitable breach in our routine. Everyone has someplace to go each summer \u2014 to the mountains in New Hampshire, to Nantucket, or to the beach house at Point O&amp;#039;Woods. We don&amp;#039;t all go at once, but the missing women and children are acknowledged like place cards at a table. Kate remembers where everyone is going, and when. &amp;quot;Jane&amp;#039;s off to Franconia,&amp;quot; she says. She gives the children calamine lotion for their bites. She sprays on Bactine and blows on their small injured knees. She is our mother, our friend, our benefactress. She advises us on what to wear to our husbands&amp;#039; company functions, to the club for lunch with our husbands&amp;#039; mothers. With Kate we wear our five-year-old bathing suits, the elastic sprung; T-shirts stained with jelly, spit-up, dirty handprints. She knows the women we become when we put on our black sheath dresses, our grandmothers&amp;#039; pearls. No one asks Kate why she&amp;#039;s left her job. We don&amp;#039;t inquire about her son, Michael, off in Europe. We imagine him trekking the Alps with a backpack, studying the flora. We picture him a biologist, an entomologist, someone who will one day work at a university. There are photos of him as a child wearing glasses, a sandy-haired boy with bony arms and legs. From these images we can create any future we like. His absence is something we accept, like our husbands&amp;#039;. Kate&amp;#039;s grown son has simply been swallowed up by the same world where they reside \u2014 a childless place, filled with work, lunch, meetings. Eventually, women from surrounding neighborhoods with ties to our walking path discover the pond, stake out their places with bedspreads and towels. They are from Pudding Hill, Whittle Lane, Bennett&amp;#039;s Hollow, names stolen by developers from early town founders. They bring floats for the children. They bring a two-man raft with paddles. They plant umbrellas and dole out cups of lemonade from large thermoses. On any given day you will find them at Kate&amp;#039;s \u2014 women we do not even know sitting in their folding chairs on Kate&amp;#039;s soft grass, or changing babies, their children running up and down Kate&amp;#039;s driveway, drawing on the tarred surface with colored chalk. She will always make introductions. She keeps diapers and snacks for the little ones. On days when thunderheads threaten lightning and rain we are always at a loss, planning trips to the movies, to the bowling alley or the Children&amp;#039;s Museum. But no one wonders about Kate. Jane thinks she is having a fine day free of us and our boisterous children with their demands and quarrels and uncontested needs. We never think to invite her along. It is August, when the sunlight through the trees is different, the pond&amp;#039;s water altered to a deeper color, that we discover Kate&amp;#039;s secret. She is ready to share it with us, her little hobby, and while the children play in the den she leads a group of us with our drinks down the basement steps. We imagine painted bookshelves or restored antique chairs. We picture, in the recesses of the basement, a sewing machine and the old-timey patterns we sewed in home economics, or yards of brocade upholstery. We clutch the wooden rail and step carefully. It is dim and smells, much as our basements do, of mildew, damp, and laundry soap. Jane Filley says, &amp;quot;Where&amp;#039;s the light?&amp;quot; and stumbles around looking for the string pull for an overhead bulb, but Kate says to wait, and she flips a switch somewhere ahead of us in the darkness, and the room illuminates, a cavernous space decorated, inexplicably, for Christmas. She has tacked up swags of fake greens filled with tiny white lights along the ceiling, threaded among the exposed pipes. There are imitation Fraser firs covered with balls and ribbons and tinsel, and those mechanical dolls dressed in Victorian garb, their mouths opening and closing to music we cannot hear. There are fake deer that dip their heads to eat and raise them to listen for predators, a miniature town set up on a large platform covered with fluffy snow-batting \u2014 churches and stores and houses, a mirror pond with ice skaters, a train doing its mechanical whir around the perimeter. There are ornaments that later Jane surmises must be the result of years of collecting \u2014 nutcrackers, angels with trumpets, glass fruit covered with glitter. We ooooh and aaaah, make the expected noises. We do not understand. Is it for the children? What is it? Maura widens her eyes and is the first to make an excuse to leave. She has the meatloaf still, she explains. She is up the stairs before anyone can stop her. Jane goes on nonstop about Christmas being her favorite holiday, and how there was one house in her neighborhood that really did it up big; we know her chattering is done as a kindness to fill the silence. The rest of us make a show of walking about and fingering ornaments, commenting on their uniqueness. One of us trips over an extension cord and a drink spills its bright tropical colors onto the pristine village snow. We all watch Kate&amp;#039;s face lose its softness, stiffen with apprehension. &amp;quot;Oh, don&amp;#039;t worry about it,&amp;quot; she tells us. She laughs and waves her hand at the spattered drifts, but no one is convinced. We end up standing in a small group by the stairs. &amp;quot;This is lovely,&amp;quot; we say. &amp;quot;This is so creative.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It isn&amp;#039;t normal to have Christmas in your basement,&amp;quot; Maura says later. We surmise that Kate has had to find a way to channel litigious energy. We notice her husband&amp;#039;s car easing into the driveway late at night and imagine her waiting all evening for him to return, gluing plastic carolers outside a miniature snow-covered house. Those of us with our own secrets silently excuse Kate&amp;#039;s hobby, feel almost traitorous about our reactions when she shared it with us. Still, the basement that is always Christmas throws everything into strange relief. Nothing is as it once seemed. Sylvia Stahl&amp;#039;s poison ivy now merits a trip to the pediatrician. Three-year-old Michael Rassmussen goes missing while we luxuriate on the pond&amp;#039;s banks, talking about our old boyfriends. We search for a frantic 10 minutes until he is found down the brook, pretending to catch fish with a stick and a piece of string. We are tired at the end of the day, more tired than we have ever been before. The housework isn&amp;#039;t done; the laundry piles up. Dark mold grows in the cracks of the shower stall. All we need are our bathing suits, washed out each night in the sink. It is an addiction, the haze, the dappled leaf shadow, the sound of the brook. We hope for Indian summer. And then August has ended, the start of school looms, and we climb the path with heavy dread. &amp;quot;The leaves can&amp;#039;t be changing?&amp;quot; someone muses. The dragonflies are gone. The field is filled with late-summer flowers. The children know. They putter in the sand. They ask for sweaters. They huddle at our feet and listen to us talking about school shopping and sales and volunteer opportunities. We are sitting in our circle one day when Maura&amp;#039;s husband appears, his leather soles flattening the drying grass, his dress shirt white like a signal flag. Heads pivot and pivot back, our faces without affect, poised for what might happen next. We suspect heart attack, stroke, car accident. And then, as the moment expands \u2014 job termination, bankruptcy, foreclosure. All of it a loss we steel ourselves against, none of it making much sense here at the pond, with the brook&amp;#039;s gurgling and the wind in the leaves. Sylvia jumps up. &amp;quot;Daddy!&amp;quot; she cries. We realize it&amp;#039;s Friday, the start of the Labor Day weekend, offices closing early. We should all be home planning our last cookouts. Maura&amp;#039;s husband approaches, scanning the area. Maura rises from her chair to meet him, and we hear his voice, the tone of it troubling. &amp;quot;This is where you&amp;#039;ve been bringing the children?&amp;quot; We suddenly see the trampled-down grass, the scattered toys and paper cups. We instinctively cover our stretched-out suits, our bug-bitten legs; smooth down our unruly hair with its neglected roots. How can it be almost fall? The cicadas wind up and die down, the silence something no one can bear. We long for their whir, the treachery of the sound. Maura&amp;#039;s husband steps up to the pond and looks down into it. His reflection wavers on the dull surface. &amp;quot;You know there might be fertilizer runoff here,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Contaminants.&amp;quot; He thinks he will collect a sample and send it to the EPA for analysis. On the way down the end-of-day feeling overpowers us. Kate&amp;#039;s house is quiet, and she is nowhere. The children tap on the French doors until we order them away. We don&amp;#039;t know what to make of any of this, or what we have become, or what the use of it all was. The summer fades. Jane Filley gets a part-time job while her children are in school. She is a clerk in the town hall, and wears sweater sets and talks about the townspeople who come in for permits and variances. Maura is pulled over while driving Max to soccer practice. &amp;quot;One glass of wine,&amp;quot; she insists. &amp;quot;That was all I had.&amp;quot; One or two of us volunteer for the Prison Store, where items hand-carved by prisoners are sold: towel racks, finials, bedposts. We become homeroom moms, and bake for school fund-raisers. We plan meals with care, fold our husbands&amp;#039; undershirts and place them in the drawer the way they like. When Kate and Walt Curry divorce, we learn that Kate&amp;#039;s son was not in Europe after all, examining insects for an academic thesis. He died the December before of an undisclosed illness. We tell each other we couldn&amp;#039;t have known. We agree there was nothing we could have done, but each of us holds the flutter of doubt, the dark brushing of its wings. In early winter we see the Realtor&amp;#039;s sign go up in front of the Currys&amp;#039; house, and we watch the house emptied out. We see the dismantling of the basement through our living room windows \u2014 the evergreen swags, shards of colored glass, metallic bows, white false snow all set out in a trash can by the curb. The early settlers buried their children in family cemeteries. But the 2-year-old girl who has become part of local legend had a lone grave separate from her siblings&amp;#039;, placed on a rise of land visible from the house&amp;#039;s second-story window. Here her mother would have paused, her arms heavy with laundry or firewood, with another child on her hip, and then moved on to the baking of bread, to the planting of her garden, to the demands of the house that bring forgetfulness. Someone sees Kate Curry at Shaw&amp;#039;s Supermarket, her hair dyed a new color. She&amp;#039;s gotten an offer with a firm in New York City, or Boston. She is spending the winter at a friend&amp;#039;s villa in Tortola. Some of us still go alone up the secret path through the woods. We see the trees fan out like a blaze, the pond coated with ice. We watch the fog settle among the bare, black branches and the snow fall, its obscuring blanket. We long for the sun in our hair, the children&amp;#039;s voices, high and happy. But we have come to understand that each passing day, filled with the work of our lives, is its own solace. Karen Brown lives in Tampa, FL. Winner of an O. Henry Award in 2006,she is currently writing a novel. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/inspirational-stories/a18912/short-fiction-stories-at-the-pond/>