Behind the Puddle

The puddle has not changed because I watched it. I have changed because I stayed with it. I keep coming back to that.

The puddle doesn’t know I am here. It doesn’t know I named the herons Stella and Stanley or that Hadley named a turtle Shelly. Pinecone certainly doesn’t know there are people who now recognize a squirrel they have never actually met.

The geese don’t know I have watched their babies grow. The mallards don’t know I worried about them. The birds don’t know I sometimes feel guilty when the feeders are empty. The puddle has simply continued being what it is.

It has remained water, mud, wildlife, weather, and seasons. It is a little ecosystem behind our house that was carrying on perfectly well before I pulled up a chair and started paying attention. For years, I wanted it to be something different.

I wanted it to be deeper, cleaner, healthier, more like the lake it was intended to be, and less deserving of the nickname we gave it. There are still things I would change if I could. But somewhere along the way, wanting something better stopped preventing me from appreciating what was already here.

I think that may be one of the most important things this place has taught me. Appreciation doesn’t require perfection. It doesn’t even require satisfaction. We can appreciate something and still wish parts of it were different.

We can love a place and recognize its problems. We can love people and know their imperfections. We can appreciate our lives while acknowledging the parts that are difficult.

Maybe appreciation isn’t pretending everything is wonderful. Maybe it is refusing to let what isn’t keep us from seeing what is. And there has been so much here.

I have watched baby geese grow into nearly grown geese and mallards learn their way around the puddle. I have seen herons appear when I least expected them and a turtle cross the water. I have watched a squirrel steal food and birds empty the feeders faster than seems financially reasonable.

I have watched my granddaughters walk beside the water and see things differently than I do. There have been dogs sleeping nearby, neighbors stopping, and Brian sitting beside me. There has been rain, heat, quiet mornings, and long evenings. There have been days when something wonderful happened and days when nothing happened at all.

I didn’t know when we put this patio in that I was creating a place where I would learn to stay. I did not learn to stay forever or refuse change. I learned to stay in a moment long enough to actually experience it.

I have spent a lot of my life thinking about what comes next by planning, preparing, worrying, solving, and wondering whether something should change. There is usefulness in all of that. But there is also something to be said for occasionally allowing life to be what it is before deciding what it needs to become.

That may be what appreciation has become for me. It is not a gratitude list, an attempt to convince myself to be thankful because someone somewhere has less, or a reason to pretend difficult things aren’t difficult. It is simply noticing what is here while it is still here.

Maybe that is why appreciation feels different from gratitude to me now. Gratitude can be a moment. Appreciation grows through relationship. It develops through familiarity, attention, and staying long enough to know something beyond the first impression.

I didn’t fall in love with the puddle because it became more beautiful. I learned to see more beauty because I stayed. Perhaps there are other things in my life waiting for that same kind of attention.

There are people I know so well that I sometimes forget to notice them. There are ordinary routines I assume will always be here and places I pass without looking. There are also parts of my own life I have been too busy trying to improve to appreciate.

The puddle will keep changing. Summer will eventually give way to fall. Some visitors will leave, and others will arrive. There will be things I miss and things I haven’t met yet.

I will change too. But I hope I carry this with me: You don’t have to wait until something becomes what you hoped it would be before you appreciate what it already is. Sometimes you just have to stay long enough to see it.