Whispers and Shouts: Popcorn Pond

I love Reston. Maybe it’s a silly fake town, but it’s a good silly fake town. The boys and I took time a couple weeks ago to visit a pond we always see part of as we walk past. It turns out there are a several ponds back there in the trees, and they’re more of a planned and maintained veritable wetland biome than just a couple ponds. The first time we were there the boys loved the white pebbles on the paths around the ponds and so over and over they brought me handfuls of the pebbles that they called popcorn and I pretended to gobble them up and let them spill down my front. Since then we’ve been back a couple times and the boys have dubbed the whole area Popcorn Pond.

Last weekend we took stale bread out in search of ducks at Popcorn Pond. It took us awhile, but when we found the third pond, which includes an island and a bridge to the island, we found several pairs of wood ducks. They ate our bread after a little coaxing. It was a beautiful day and I kept wishing I knew more science-y things to teach the boys as we walked around. They loved the cattails and loved letting the wind carry the seeds in their fuzzy airplanes all around the blue sky. There were stones with Walt Whitman and William Cullen Bryant verses on them. And this is all, as they say, a stone’s throw from our house. What a fun surprise!