Back to the Pond: The Place That Built Me

Describe a place from your character’s childhood that shaped who they are now.

Most kids in Maple Hollow grew up loitering behind the gas station or sneaking candy from Mrs. Delaney’s gift shop. Leah grew up behind the library.

The little pond back there wasn’t much. Technically it was a retention basin—something about runoff and sediment—but to eleven-year-old Leah, it was perfect. Encircled by scrappy birch trees and half-buried benches, it felt like a secret the town had forgotten.

That’s where Leah first built something that worked.

It was late spring, the kind of day where the breeze still bit a little, but the sun meant well. She crouched by the pond’s edge with her prototype—a water-cleaning robot made from an old RC boat, duct tape, a repurposed aquarium filter, and a whole lot of very scientific zip ties.

“I don’t think it’s supposed to make that noise,” said Charlie, who had been “helping” by eating Goldfish crackers and naming the robot Sir Sploosh-a-Lot.

“It’s processing,” Leah said, though she wasn’t sure. The motor was definitely wheezing like an asthmatic raccoon.

She adjusted the angle of the intake tube and nudged the boat into the water.

Sir Sploosh-a-Lot drifted, wobbled, then sprang to life with a majestic splutter.

It worked—sort of. The motor pushed water through the filter, and the murky surface cleared in its path. Leah grinned, electric with triumph. For five full minutes, it was glorious.

Then it hit a rock and flipped.

Leah’s jaw dropped. Charlie burst out laughing, mouth full of crackers. “Oh no! Sir Sploosh has been defeated by the terrain!”

Leah scrambled for a stick to fish it out, soaked up to her elbows, panicked and mortified. She didn’t laugh. She rarely did when things failed. Not even robot things.

But Charlie didn’t mock her. She didn’t even try to fix it. She just sat beside Leah, legs swinging off the edge of the dock, and said, “It still cleaned a little. That’s something.”

It was, Leah realized later, the first time she felt truly seen. Not for being smart. Not for being fast. But for trying.

That pond saw a lot of versions of Leah.

There was the time she tested her homemade “weather balloon” (a trash bag filled with helium from her cousin’s birthday party—it got stuck in a tree within six minutes). Or when she built a frog-tracking app using a spreadsheet and a walkie-talkie. The library staff learned to look the other way. Sometimes they even brought snacks.

Charlie was always there—loyal, curious, unflinchingly earnest. They were mismatched, really. Charlie made paper mâché volcanoes that exploded confetti. Leah made spreadsheets to calculate the ideal sugar-to-cocoa ratio for hot chocolate. But somehow, they worked.

Until they didn’t.

Leah didn’t mean to drift away. But when her coding won the state science fair and MIT started sending brochures, everything felt like it needed more focus, more strategy. Friendship became background noise to the symphony of ambition. She told herself it was temporary.

Charlie didn’t chase her when she stopped showing up at the pond.

Years later, Leah would tell herself it was inevitable—just one of those childhood things that got lost in the shuffle of growing up. But sometimes, in the sleepless hours between code pushes and product launches, she’d remember that pond. The dock. The moment something she built—however briefly—made the world a little cleaner.

She never did fix Sir Sploosh-a-Lot. But she kept the motor. It lived in a box of wires she never threw out, long after she stopped believing in duct tape miracles.

When she came back to Maple Hollow as an adult—burned out, disillusioned, jobless—she took a walk one morning and found herself standing at the edge of that same pond.

The dock was gone, rotted away. The filter had long since returned to nature. But the water shimmered with spring light, and she could still picture eleven-year-old Leah, sleeves rolled up, ready to solve the world one half-working gadget at a time.

She heard someone behind her crunch through the grass.

“Let me guess,” Charlie said, grinning. “You’re here to recover the ruins of Sir Sploosh-a-Lot.”

Leah turned, and for once, didn’t deflect with sarcasm.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I think I am.”