Once, when I was a little girl, my brother and I brought home some very strange pets. We had been for a walk with our parents and had seen some big rain puddles with little wriggling creatures inside. My daddy said that they were tadpoles. We got a jar and scooped up a bunch of water with little tadpoles in it and carried them back to our house. Out in the back yard, my daddy dug a big hole and filled it with water from a hose. Then he laid a wooden plank across the hole, and we put the tadpoles into their new home. Every morning before school, my brother had to go out and fill the hole with water, so the tadpoles would have plenty of room to swim, and every afternoon when he got home we would stretch ourselves out on the plank and look into the water to see what our new pets were doing. As the weeks went by, the tadpoles began to change. First they grew little stumps on their bodies. Then the stumps grew longer and longer until they looked like arms and legs. Then their little tails started to shrink away. Finally, one morning when we went outside, there were no more tadpoles in the water! Where did they go? How did we lose our pets? And then we saw something else, lots of little somethings, a hundred of them, hopping unexpectedly up out of the grass. Our tadpoles had completed their transformation and now our pets were frogs!
Category: Back when…
I bet this didn’t happen to you today
I bet you didn’t set off on a very wet day to walk several blocks to teach an English class because you knew that it was a little weird to go on a rainy day, but it wasn’t raining right at that moment and it was supposed to be the first class and you didn’t want that nice young girl to think you forgot about her. I bet you didn’t discover that the last two blocks were on unpaved and VERY muddy streets. I bet you didn’t think, “Hey! I used to live in a place that was ALL muddy streets. I know how to handle this. I can find a path through the mud.” I bet you didn’t squish through a little wet grass because it was slightly less muddy and then eye that pile of rocks to see if you could jump on it and get around the massive puddle across the entire road. I bet you didn’t find out after you jumped that it wasn’t a pile of rocks, but really just a cleverly disguised pile of mud. I bet your foot did not sink to the ankle into the mud. I bet when you tried to quickly pull your foot out to minimize mess, your shoe did NOT stay in the mud while your bare foot came out on its own. And I definitely bet that you did not overcorrect and have to step your bare foot deep into that same mud. I’ll also bet you didn’t decide this was all a mistake of judgment, pry your shoe from the mud, put in on your slippery foot, and squelch several blocks home hoping beyond hope you wouldn’t run into anyone you knew.
But if I’m wrong and this did happen to you today, please let me know. It would help me not feel so alone.
Deborah Dunlevy 