Kellie asked about the frog spawn that lived on my childhood dresser despite my Muggle origins.
The West Virginia subdivision in which I lived from 1980 until 1987 had its own pond. It wasn't a decorative kind of pond; it was tucked away behind the houses. It wasn't a place, as far as I recall, where grownups went to walk or fish. In my memory, only kids visited the pond. Once in the spring of 1982 I was prowling around its edges when I noticed the frog spawn. "That's nifty," I thought to myself. I came back with a Mason jar, and took some spawn and some pond water back home with me.
I am trying to remember what my mother said about this. She cannot have thought it was a great idea for me to store frog spawn on my nice wooden dresser. The conversation is a blank in my memory. Maybe I thought she wouldn't notice? I cannot say.
The eggs hatched out tiny tadpoles, and they grew into bigger tadpoles, and they sprouted leglets. I was going to camp just as things were getting interesting, so I took my jar along and parked it on my dresser there. (So many questions here. I must have fed them...something. But what?) The jar began to give off a decided aroma of Tadpoles With Suboptimal Personal Hygiene, though. We'd probably all have suboptimal personal hygiene if we swam around in our own waste. I think I was worried about changing their water because I knew chlorinated tap water could kill them. My poor roommate at camp did not complain, but surely she wanted to.
I thought the tadpoles were the coolest things ever. Leglets! Eyes! Mobility! All of this burgeoning life had burst forth from the tiny black speckles I only happened to notice on the edge of the pond. Who knew biology was so awesome? I wrote a bunch of poems for the camp's literary journal, and I used "Miss Tadpole" as my pseudonym. Doesn't every 12-year-old girl yearn to name herself after something slimy and amphibious?
The eventual fate of the tadpoles is another sad lacuna in my memory, I'm afraid. I think maybe some of them died in their icky jar. Did I return the rest of them to their pond when I got back home? Did my mother flush them in a moment of fervid disgust? I don't remember the end of the story, and there are some uncertain bits in the middle too. But I do remember the fascination of watching them unfurl. And the experience leaves me a little skeptical about chia pudding.
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