I have no knowledge of the size of the millpond where my mother lived as a small child in North Carolina in the second decade of the last century.
It certainly was not as big as the White Oak River is at Stella, NC where I snapped this snapshot.
But the millpond was a very important part of my mother's life as a child in that period from 1910 to1920.
It was a very rural area and her dad was a miller. She told stories of walking by a wagon to Winston-Salem about twenty miles away where they sold things which they produced on the farm.
My mother remembered her dad having one of the first automobiles in the county. Apparently he never really adjusted to having to pay attention to driving. He was used to the horses knowing where they were going.
It is hard to imagine that a couple of her grandchildren are living in the Reston world where life has become so urbanized.
In less than 100 years our family has gone from living on the edge of a millpond where they produced most of their own food to living in Reston where some people think that boneless chicken breasts is the only kind of chicken there is.
The changes are so massive that they are hard to catalog. Mother's father cured country hams in an unrefrigerated shed. Her grandchildren look carefully at the expiration dates on their store bought food.
While each time has it own challenges, I suspect that the modern world isolates us so much from family that the problems of today are often faced alone instead of with family at your side.
The near impossibility of families staying geographically close together in this modern world is perhaps one of the great tragedies of the modern world.
While our technology makes it easier to reach out and touch someone that you do not know, it also makes it easier to be pulled away from our millponds of life.
I wonder if Reston had any millponds?
