7. Cattails

We couldn’t believe this pond had been there the whole time we’d lived on the block, just through the vacant lot next to the Noble’s house. We always thought it was a vacant lot that led nowhere, the end of the world. But no: someone—and no one even know who it was, probably Philip Reich, he was the most adventurous of us, the most willing to get in trouble—found out that if you walked through those weeds, walked a long way, a mile or more, you’d end up on a street called Jean Drive, which was an older road with older houses, not a development like ours, and then if you walked a little way on Jean Drive you’d come to the Little Pond.

I don’t know who started calling it the Little Pond, either. 

You could fish there. You could catch frogs. You could skip stones. If you threw a good, flat one, you could make the stone skip all the way to the other side.

Best of all, there were these plants none of us had ever seen before. They grew right in the water. It was hard to get to them without getting your sneakers soaked, but they were worth it. They were brown, capsule-shaped, and had some kind of fur around them. You could rub them along your hands or face, they were that soft. And if you opened them up, they were full of white seeds—again, soft, like fur.

We met at the Little Pond every day after school. Even just to stare out over the water, to think that someplace like this existed for all the years we’d lived on the block and none of us had ever had discovered it before:  it was amazing to us. We talked about how in the winter, when it iced over, we’d set up nets, have ice hockey games. None of us had skates. We’d ask for them for Christmas. It would be easy to learn, at such a cool place as this.

I decided one day to bring some of the brown capsule plants home. I had this idea of growing them myself, in our backyard. Every time I looked out my window, I’d see them, and think of the Little Pond.

I knew the plants needed a lot of water, so I put them behind our willow tree where sometimes after a lot of rain the sewage flooded up from under the ground. I tore some of them apart, to free the seeds, but some I just buried halfway in the ground.

My father must have spotted them when he was mowing the lawn. “Hey, I noticed your little garden out there,” he said to me.

I worried he would make me pull them out. “It’s way in the back,” I said. “They don’t grow very tall. They’re called fur bombs.”

He smiled. “It’s okay. I don’t think they’re going to grow anyway. But you know what they’re really called, right?”

I nodded my head no.

“Cattails. We had some in a park in my neighborhood. I remember there was this one kid, I remember he used to douse them with gasoline and light them up like torches. Philly Lamarca, that was his name.”

Usually I liked listening to my father’s stories of when he was a kid: the other kids in his neighborhood, the stickball games they played, the sports teams he followed. He was a good storyteller.

“Where did you even find them?” he asked, but I’d already turned away. I was angry. Not that he’d found my garden. But that he knew these plants, which were so strange and mysterious to me, just like the Little Pond itself, that he already had his own story about them.

You don’t get to get to everything first, I was thinking. You don’t get to name everything for me.