"I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days." -- Henry David Thoreau

Woodchoppers and the iron horse had not yet greatly damaged the beauty of its setting. A boy could go to the pond and lie on his back against the seat of a boat, lazily drifting from shore to shore while the loons dived and the swallows dipped around him. Thoreau loved to recall such sunny hours and summer days, "when idleness was the most attractive and productive business."

I too was a boy in love with a pond, rich in sunny hours and summer days. Sun and summer are still what they always were, but the boy and the pond changed. The boy, who is now a man, no longer find much time for idle drifting. The pond has been annexed by a great city.

When Thoreau wrote that line, he was thinking of the Walden Pond he knew as a boy.

The swamps where herons once hunted are now drained and filled with houses. The bay where water lilies quietly floated is now a harbor for motor boats. In short, everything that the boy loved no longer exists -- except in the man's memory of it.

The past is the bank in which we store our most valuable possession: the memories that give meaning and depth to our lives.

Some people insist that only today and tomorrow matter. But how much poorer we would be if we really lived by that rule! So much of what we do today is frivolous and futile and soon forgotten. So much of what we hope to do tomorrow never happens.

Death itself is powerless to still a remembered voice or erase a remembered smile. And for one boy who is now a man, there is a pond which neither time nor tide can change, where he can still spend a quite hour in the sun.

Those who truly treasure the past will not bemoan the passing of the good old days, because days enshrined in memory are never lost.