My Grandpa's pond.

    That's still how I think of it, "Grandpa's pond." He's been dead for 22 years now but that's how I'll always think of it. Or just "the pond." Grandpa had three ponds. There was the main pond, which was the biggest and known simply as "the pond." There was the "far pond," so called because it was the furthest from the house. And there was the "small pond." The small pond had no fish in it and was mainly a watering hole for livestock. The far pond had fish in it (rumored) but it wasn't much bigger than the small pond, had no trees and was just plain too far to walk - or ride, since we were often on horseback.

    Sizewise, if I had to guess I'd say it was a quarter acre, maybe less. It grew and shrunk as all ponds do, depending on the amount of rainfall we'd had - or hadn't had. My grandpa had enlarged the pond with a bulldozer when he first bought the land, then proceeded to stock it four and five fish at a time with game fish he'd caught in other ponds or at John Redmond Reservoir or maybe the Neosho river. Eventually the pond built up thriving populations of several popular game species: catfish, largemouth bass and channel cat. No one fished on the pond except immediate family so the fish had unrestricted license to reproduce and multiply to the limits of their habitat. That's exactly what they did.

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