Chapter XVI: To the Present

Returning to the concept we used in the beginning, the ambiance of this two hundred year old homestead near the Pond, its lawns, trees, shrubs, flowers and forest is an example of the past becoming part of the present. The continuum into the present is enriched by what was accomplished long years ago on this spot. Shakespeare said the past is prologue. The past does speak to us here. Because of the maturing, we have the present pleasure. What went before us, slowly brought about by all those living here since the beginning, using human hands, endurance, spirit, taste, produced in our time a beautiful habitation for fully human dwelling. Time, nature and people worked together to produce a kind of ideal habitation such as Josiah Cotton, inspired by the poet, Pomfret, looked forward to in his time, so long ago.

Kamesit, the region around these ponds, is no longer as the Indians once knew it, but the charm of the region endures, in part from the ever renewing cycle of nature, the beauty that has been allowed to flourish by itself during the seasons, especially the beauty of spring flowers and the flaming colors of autumn, as well as even the clean snows after a winter blizzard. The loving care of the humans here from beyond two centuries gives delight to the present dwellers and their friends who visit. I would like to pay what homage I can raise to this care.

It is my hope that this excursion into the past, even though much of what went on cannot be recaptured, something of what we found will produce and illuminate experience now and give a place and identity in the present to what survives from long years ago.

the mile

the nylon swimming trunks expand with green
as they follow the arms into the smooth wind
down into the crayfish hour where leeches beat
and grin; holding then a long while of wind
I flash beneath the rippled skims and rattling boughs.
down and straight out; becoming aqua-like again
as the currents of cold catch hold of the sheaves
of scalp and blow them in silence
only to surface and explode, imbibe and
refer the crest to gulls; down into a rhythm
of quest. here shattering whole schools of
fish and words I pry the pond apart and it
regains me and squirts me out into the sailboat air.
I touch the blossoming float of bobbing
barrels and plane tree sides linked in beams
of rocking wind and fresh pine trees crippling the breeze.
up now the way I sit resting from the first
one thousand strokes watching cool brooking pond
glaze broiling on the planks then
dipped into the longest hike of all I suddenly
coast into the deeps leaving only behind
“we are not come into mourning.”

--Tom Daley
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

(A recollection from his experience of swimming the length of Boot
Pond and back)