The water feature

I can be a little obsessive sometimes. The latest object of my obsession is what gardening books refer to as the “water feature.” It is not enough, apparently, that I spend the summer in a house on the river. I need a fountain too.

In the course of writing an article on how to make your own tabletop fountain, I discovered my yen for the zen of water flowing from small pipes into larger receptacles. Spare me the Freudian interpretations, Reader. Let’s not go there.

On a trip to Saratoga Springs, I found the Garden of Eden of statuary in a shop on Putnam Street. As my husband waited in the car reading the Times, I wandered through an outdoor showroom crammed with angels and cherubs and children reading stone books, looking for a trough to complete my vision of a wall-mounted waterfall. There were three of them, all different sizes. I was enthralled. But the proprietor would not comply with my request to buy the trough separately. And even my obsessive nature would not agree to buy a pre-constructed fountain. Where is the art? Where is the $800?

At home again by the river, I searched the Internet for stone troughs. The shipping costs alone would require a mortgage. But others, as obsessive as me, had invented Hypertufa, a substitute for stone mavens. I sent for a kit immediately. For $30, I would make my own stone trough.

I began to spend my days searching for the perfect fountainhead. Ayn Rand, step aside. I cruised the plumbing aisles of hardware stores and probed the minds of men and teenaged boys for the right kind of copper elbow to attach to my brass spigot.

I read the Dremel tool manual as though it were a romance novel, late at night in bed with bon-bons. I learned to solder.

My garden wilted in the midsummer heat as I puttered in the garage with pipes and pumps and hose clamps and Goop.

A galvanized bucket or a rubber feed tray at the Agway tempted me—they were large enough to hold a pump and to recapture the rapturous spray of fountain water. What to pair them with? I learned to drill holes in old colored bottles and to invent new uses for broken vases.

Gardening, now, was about the hardscape—how to raise a copper birdbath onto a pedestal and snake wire and tubing down the side so it didn’t show.

Phrases like “magnetic impeller assembly” and “graduated reducing coupler” tumbled from my tongue as easily as Campanula used to.

A neighbor, who shall remain anonymous to shield him from feminist ire, berated me for tinkering with man’s work. When I broke down and asked to borrow his hole saw, he shamed me by cutting the hole himself in front of onlookers, and sent me off like a schoolgirl in search of electrical washers to attach to my contraption.

But now I have it—a brass spigot adorned by a sculpted faerie pours water into a tin bucket gurgling and splashing lightly as it goes, as a solar panel disguised as a water lily sprays forth from a copper birdbath in the rose bed. The roses have ceased their blooming, alas. Perhaps they are jealous of my attentions.

Nearby, the river rushes or lingers, as it chooses, oblivious to my obsession.

- Cass Collins