I have two holes in my backard,each one dug by a child of mine at an age when digging holes was still fun. I filled them up with water, plopped a few fish in them, and spontaneous generation took care of the rest.

Wiggly red worms, squirming ostracods, larvae of all sorts. Dragonflies thrust their asses to the sky like tiny winged mandrills. A muskrat spent its last hours in my son's pond--I doubt it drowned, but its carcass confirmed its death.

While the economy hums along, while trades get made, folks consume, and as we continue our descent that will make lemmings look prescient, I must confess that I wile away sunny mornings staring at ponds. Oh, I might contribute to the local economy by downing an ale or two (no sense wasting time), but mostly I just sit and watch.

Late spring I played God and altered the local flora--I bought 3 sprigs of elodea. I use them in biology class, and I figured I could grow some over the summer. Like similar projects on a much larger scale, introducing a new species tipped things over a bit, and frogs can now walk over the pond barely moistening their toes.

No new lessons there.

In late June, on a particularly bright day, I noticed bubbles coming from the pond. It's not unusual to see the pond burp now and then--muck builds up on the bottom, and the mud belches some methane

This was different--it looked like a string of champagne bubbles, tiny but furiously active. The top of the pond had pockets of fine foam.

Oxygen.

I (rather pedantically) ran off to tell my son, then I tried to write. "Awe" does not fit the cerebral cortex well. It's a funny word, and the jaw drops when it is spoken. If the limbus had a conscious vocabulary, "awe" might be its second entry (right after "angst").

I still cannot find the right words. Meanwhile, I'll stare at bubbles.