THE TREE

Killens Pond is a sixty-six acre mill pond across the street from my home in Felton, Delaware. Robert Mitchum lived in Felton when he was a child and he married a Delaware girl, Dorothy Spence. He probably swam in the pond and picnicked on its banks. Some biographers say he didn’t like Felton but he came back to the Eastern Shore in the fifties and bought a farm in Talbot County, Maryland where he and Dorothy lived with their daughter. I love Killens Pond. I know it so well I literally walk the trails with my eyes closed. It’s not fed by a deep spring like Thoreau's Walden and in the summer the farm runoff can make it green as pea soup, but it can be a beautiful place. The tulip poplars, beech trees, oaks and pines grow to great heights and the air of the Mid-Atlantic forest can be rich and fragrant. I love going over there late at night when the pond is frozen and the snow is deep or in the middle of summer when there is so much life (but not when the flies are biting). I write over there, not often with a pen, but in my mind. The idea for “The Tree” came to me there.