I tried to lower the net very slowly. Fish are very skittish after a long winter of stillness at the bottom of our pond, and they needed to be dispersed among the other ponds, now that winter was past. The count still not known, I am anxious to see how many have survived this year.
They began as fourteen. The conversation with the pet shop boy made sense to my noviceness, “Try feeder fish. That’ll let you know if you are going to have problems with cats or raccoons, and it won’t cost you like koi”. That sounded wise and do-able. A dozen feeder fish were only $1.89, and one small koi was $8.95 at Wally World, which I hesitate to write after seeing the threads about what is clearly considered a sacrilege- buying koi (or anything) from Walmart. I started laughing and quit reading after “Dude, you’ve got issues! Let it die!”
Those tiny little fish, all fourteen of them, less than an inch and a half long, thrived that first summer. We never had a single floater. I would have thought we might end up with one or two survivors, IF we were lucky. And they not only survived, they got big! My children caught fish smaller than they are when they were little. And while maybe I did feed them like a nurturing surrogate mother, they also had the benefit of our pond having been established a couple of years earlier, teaming with aquatic life. They thrived.
When fall came, my mother’s heart worried about so many things concerning those fourteen now not-so-little fish. The depth of the pond was crucial for survival, and while we have three ponds (a story for another day), only one is the necessary depth. We live in the mountains of North Carolina, and it is common for that deck pond to stay frozen most of the winter. It’s also above ground. The good news is that the motor on its bubbler is a workhorse, and it has historically plugged right along through many winters. The bad news is, now I was worried this would be the year it would finally die. But if it did its job, I was a little reassured in thinking they could go deep and still have oxygen. But, there were fourteen of them…too many to house together? The pet store said ‘yes’, but I didn’t have a tank big enough to bring them in, winter was practically upon us, and so it literally became a sink or swim situation! 
That winter was one for the books. We had an ice storm like no other. It set records. Damage was severe everywhere. The Blue Ridge Parkway made the news and tourists fretted about their summer trips. In our yard alone, old pines lay on power lines and emergency crews battled high winds and frigid temperatures to prevent those big guys from puncturing our windows and roof. Their branches lay over the pond, and my heart sank again, first in seeing the devastation, then in worrying about what I couldn’t see under the ice. It seemed the jarring alone could have been like an earthquake effect to those little guys, and I found myself wondering if fish could go deaf, or have brain damage that might cause them to swim in circles, if they lived through it at all. I thought of fish-ciles , little skewered fish like you’d see on the barbeque, and of course I had visions of spring thaw and lifeless bodies rolled around in my head, too. These were my babies, practically raised from fry, and I wanted them to swim again…in a straight line, not in circles!
When spring finally came, after holding my breath all winter, I saw signs of life. There were flashes of color around pieces of floating ice, and I smiled all that day. There weren’t frozen fish-cicles in the ice, and there weren’t any floaters! AND, miracle of miracles, there were eighteen fish, at least that I could count. We had grown fish, and we didn’t even know!
This past winter was only slightly kinder. We didn’t have felled trees, but the freeze conditions were harsh and I wondered how the fish fared with a little less worry, assured that we have a strain of pretty resilient fish. This year they are twenty-seven strong. That is the miracle of multiplication. If conditions are in order, many prayers are prayed, and hope is in place, it can happen. It is a lesson for this hour. While conditions may be foreboding, multiplication, even miracles, can happen. And like the sage advice of the internet thread guy, we need to realize we have issues that are based on what our eyes see, or our hearts anticipate. And as he so wisely counseled, we need to “let them die, dude!”.
The memory of all this came as I read this morning, knowing afterward I needed to turn on the news to see the outcome of Osama Bin Laden having been shot, to see the devastation still faced by Japan and Alabama. Something of not looking at circumstances, rather to God has been prefaced. I smiled now, as I did when Prince William and Kate married, an encouragement, in the midst of storms.
Hab 3:17 Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
Hab 3:18 yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
Hab 3:19 The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights.
