The Very Rev. Gideon L. K. Pollach is the Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where he has been asking what the pond has to teach since before he knew he was asking.
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This week a sure sign of spring: the spring peepers appeared on Thursday. I heard them for the first time as I left the church in the afternoon, small exaltations rising from the water's edge, declaring something we cannot understand but that they cannot stop saying.
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The male swan is patrolling. His mate is nesting in the northeast corner, out of sight from the road, tending something small and fragile and not yet born. And he is out here doing what he does every spring: driving away anything that comes near.
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Earlier this week, a swan was working at the edge of the ice when we saw it pressing its long neck down through the gray surface, reaching for food beneath. Woodford and I stood at the water without speaking, the way you do when something has earned your full attention.
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I find myself standing at the edge more than usual this week, trying to read it. The heron is already back at its post, unbothered by the ambiguity. It simply stands in whatever the pond is, and waits.
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Anyone who has ever tried to hide something by putting more on top of it knows this. Paint over a damaged wall and the cracks show through worse than before. Hang a door on a crooked frame and every gap announces itself.
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This is mid-winter break, and many of us are on the move. Some have headed somewhere warmer, some somewhere colder, some are just home with the kids trying to make it to Friday. \
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We've entered the stage of winter that nobody writes poems about: too warm for beauty, too cold for growth. Just a mess.
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This past Sunday, while most of America watched the big game, the owls of Cold Spring Harbor were doing what they've done every winter evening for longer than any of us have lived here. They were hunting in the dark. Great horned owls are nesting right now — in
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The pond isn't resisting or apologizing for this transformation. It's simply being what this temperature and this snowfall have made it: a place transformed by conditions it didn't choose but isn't fighting either.
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The snow teaches us the deepest realities don't depend on our activity.
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If you've walked past St. John's Pond this week, you've seen the ice continuing to form, the surface stilling into winter quiet. The swans remain, stark white against grey water, but the visible abundance of autumn has given way to something that looks like