It’s a dreary day, the sky gray, a haze draped over the countryside. The little pond reflects those bleak winter colors, a carpet of dead leaves on the bottom. On the water, the silhouettes of bare, skeletal trees ripple — long arms stretching out over the pond, each one reaching for a sip, a drop, a shred of hope. A maple’s dried-out branch pushes through the fence around the pond and brushes against a broken, punctured life ring. Foam spills out of it like pus from a wound. Another life ring, forgotten long ago, has faded to white, four strips of tape somehow still holding it to the fence. A rope wraps around it, ivy slowly choking it.
No washing fish here, reads a handwritten sign someone’s stuck above a ceramic sink. The sink, cracked, is as white as the life ring and still somehow clean, despite the leaves that fall every autumn and the gnats that splatter everywhere in summer.
Someone once threw an iron ladder into the pond — rusted through by now. Four wrought-iron chairs sit around the circle of water: one missing a leg, one with a broken backrest, one holding an old cushion that must have once been as blue as the water. Only one chair is untouched, almost looking like a vintage design piece. At the entrance to the pond, on the right, stands a small wooden shed, padlocked shut, where you could once rent fishing rods, bait, and yellow rubber boots. Ivy has climbed all the way up to the shed’s roof, where, come summer, a family of great tits once built their nest.
In front of the shed, near the ceramic sink, there’s a tin-sheet kiosk that looks almost like a shipping container. There, once you’d rented your fishing gear, you could grab a beer, a sausage-and-pepper sandwich, and fries that were always soggy.
Must’ve been the humidity, thinks Signora Annalisa, picking up a black plastic bag someone left by the pond, as if it were a dump. Armed with rubber gloves and a litter picker, Signora Annalisa finds herself remembering a rainbow trout her husband once brought home on a Sunday evening. Her dear Tonio — better at popping open beers than actually fishing — had come home pleased with himself, carrying a greasy, damp paper bag. Inside was that beautiful silver fish, which Signora Annalisa had baked in the oven. Plenty of rosemary and sage from her garden, a pinch of salt, two lemon slices each. Tonio had nearly choked on a bone, but a sip of Sauvignon had washed it down. One Sunday, Signora Annalisa had gone with her husband to the pond after morning Mass. She hadn’t gone near the water, but she had gotten her hands messy with a sausage, onion and pepper sandwich. She hadn’t touched the beer, but she’d allowed herself a splash of herb grappa in her coffee.
Children ran around the maple trees playing hide-and-seek, while their parents watched from red canvas folding chairs. Every so often someone would shout “careful!” in the general direction of the noise, without ever getting up. On the few plastic lounge chairs scattered around, small groups played briscola, and women talked at length about the new waitress at the pond — the owner’s young niece, sent out there by her parents, in the middle of nowhere, all the way from the city. Whatever she’d done to deserve it, poor thing, ending up out here.
Among the tall weeds, Signora Annalisa spots a pair of broken boots and a single flip-flop — just the one. With her litter picker, she gathers it all up and tosses it into her trash bag. She hears the bells toll eleven times: time to head home and feed her Siamese cat. One day, Signora Annalisa will haul away the life rings and the chairs with a wheelbarrow. Maybe she’ll get some help from the waitress who, grown into a woman now, never did leave the village.
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