Matt Cunningham gazes at the pond where his toddler son almost died 3fi months ago, and the scene he describes could scarcely be more different from this sunny and mild June morning.

Today, the second day of summer, the pond is placid, its surface broken only by a few leaves from the cottonwoods and the aspens that shade the water.

But the words Matt uses as he talks about the morning of March 9, when snow lingered and the grass was dead and brown and the trees were bare, are the antithesis of this tranquil setting.

They are harsh words, scary words, and they spill from Matt’s mouth in a staccato rhythm.

“Terrifying,” he says.

And “hellish.”

And “ugliness.”

And “unbelievable.”

This last word perhaps best explains the situation that confronted Matt, 42, and his wife of 19 years, Elsa, 41, on that chilly late-winter morning.

On that morning waves splashed the pond’s sodden shore as Elsa plunged into the frigid water and grabbed the figure that floated there, as motionless as a mannequin.

It was Matty, the youngest of the Cunninghams’ six children.

He was less than two months from his second birthday.

Elsa laid her son on the pond’s muddy bank, his jacket soaked, his blond hair plastered to his skull.

She started to perform chest compressions.

Matt arrived just a few seconds later.

He breathed deeply into his boy’s cold, wet mouth.

Matt says he doesn’t completely trust his memories of that morning.

“I remember it clearly — or at least I think I do,” he said.

But he is absolutely certain of what he was thinking during those few minutes before the paramedics arrived, the thoughts that screamed inside his head as he leaned over his son’s pallid face and pressed his lips to Matty’s blue ones.

“Our whole life’s worth is going up in smoke,” Matt says. “This can’t be happening.”

It would be easier to believe that it didn’t happen, as you watch Matty prance about his family’s living room, brandishing a tennis racket and displaying a two-handed backhand grip that would please a tennis teacher.

“His brothers think he’s going to be a pro,” Elsa says.

John, 17, and Shane, 15, both play tennis for Baker High School, and every member of the family has a racket.

(Matty’s other siblings are brother Daniel, 12, and sisters Isabel, 9, and Abigail, 8.)

Matty is wearing blue plaid shorts and a bright yellow T-shirt and his feet, slapping with a pleasant thump on the hardwood floor, still show a bit of the baby’s chubby creases at the ankle.

“He’s doing perfect,” Matt says, smiling as Matty cavorts across the floor, his close-cropped hair bright in the sunshine that slants through the picture windows, his energy so palpable you could probably power a couple of households if only you could capture the megawatts.

Elsa talks about the videos she made of Matty before the accident, in particular the ones where he dances.

Elsa wondered, on that awful March day, whether she could ever bear to watch those videos.

She wondered whether they would forever more be the most tangible evidence of her bright and effervescent boy.

But now Elsa can smile.

Once again those videos are what they are supposed to be for a parent — milestones of a growing life, to be relished at each viewing, the only sadness that of nostalgia for the boy who has become a man.

“I’ve made more videos of his dancing,” Elsa says, not saying, and not needing to say, that she means dancing that Matty has done since March 9.

“He’s fine. A perfect boy.”

See more in the June 26, 2017, issue of the Baker City Herald.