My Mother... and Her Koi Pond

Whenever I visit my mother's house, I like to walk around her garden and marvel at the oasis of greenery she's created. If you saw it, you might just think, "Yeah, a perfect yard out of a landscaping magazine. Whatever." You'd have to know the backstory--the house is in the high desert, where it reaches 115 degrees in summer. Tumbleweeds roll, and the land is baked to the point of cracking. When my mother and her husband bought the house, there was no yard whatsoever. They chopped at the dry dirt, removed all the rocks, planted every tree, hauled all the mulch, built the fence, dug up the used brick from my grandfather's house and laid a brick patio and walkway at theirs. (I remember lying on my stomach on those cool bricks at my grandparents' house when I was a child, watching ants or caterpillars go by, or just digging at the sand between the bricks with my fingertips. My grandparents are dead now and that house has now been sold to another family, so it makes me happy to think that the same bricks are at my mom's house.)

True, my mother could use less water; she has quite a bit of grass; every blade of it perfectly blue-green and well-watered.
But I can't judge, because all the green really makes it feel like an oasis out there in the summer, and maybe they really need that feeling. Just walking two blocks to see a neighbor's llamas, I thought, "Am I going to dehydrate, fall down and die out here?" And it was only 8:00 am! Walking back and reaching the house, the sight of the trees and that expanse of lawn is reassuring. (If the grass is still alive, so am I.")

My mom is extremely DIY, and she decided to build a koi pond. Build a koi pond, she did! She dug a hole, fitted in a shell ("The shell is prefabricated," she told me glumly), laid the rock around the pond, and installed a pump and filter system.
She added water plants and lastly, the fish. They're doing great, and the pond even attracted toads and a crane-type bird which my mother says swooped down and took off with one of her fish. She was not happy, but the story made me laugh. The pond is always shaded, which is what the fish and plants need. She placed it in a spot that's always in the shade of an enormous tree.