Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

I have written a fair bit about my son’s pond and its inhabitants. I find watching the fish to be both calming and enlightening. It does not matter whether I am projecting human values onto the behaviour of the fish or reading too much into their antics. What matters is that watching them, engaging with them, has taught me a lot about how the human mind works. Truth can take any form that is amenable to understanding and sometimes, it looks like a fish.

Every so often, however, I must get closer to the fish and their domain than I would like. Pond maintenance is no joke, but it is my job. Filters must be cleaned, pumps must be hauled out and hosed, dead things removed and by the time you are done, you are all too intimately acquainted with water and its murky depths.

As I look down at…