Lake Jacob

When our son was a preschooler, his favorite activity was spending hours in the garden, digging deep holes. (At the time, Louis Sachar's young adult novel, Holes, had yet to be written.) He used the holes for places to play with his toy tractors and earth-movers. Some of them were so deep he would disappear in them, and I'd be surprised when I called for him, to see his little head pop out of a hole like a prairie dog.


When he was twelve, he began racing motocross. He and his dad rented a small earth-mover called a Bobcat and started tranforming our beautiful pasture into a practice track, complete with twelve-foot-high jumps, berms and whoops. Jacob operated the machine as much as his dad did, and dug this small pond at the far corner of the pasture, so he could use the dirt to build his jumps.


After he grew up and moved away, we paid a neighbor with a bulldozer to restore our pasture, but Lake Jacob remains as a small watering hole for the wildlife.  This winter it's been so mild, it has yet to freeze over.