Fishing for Tadpoles

My father settled in a small logging town up north, with a new-old Walmart, a seasonal Dairy Queen, and a small fair every summer where the farmers would bring their horses in to win prizes. He lived in the Blue House, as I called it in contrast to both the previous Red House and White House he’d lived in before. The Blue House was giant to me, who lived in a one floor, two bedroom suburban house filled with my mother’s hoarded belongings. Most of all, it had a large, wooden deck attached to the kitchen sliding door, which led out to the backyard. 

The deck led down to a large, weedy, grassy lawn. Loose bbs hid underneath the dandelions and stickers, along with holey diet soda cans knocked down from the railing. A fire pit was dug out near the lower level of the deck, which opened up to the basement, and sometimes we would hack away the grass that had grown over the rocks to cook hot dogs for dinner. Over on the right side of the yard was a small, sour apple tree and despite our best efforts to make jams and pies with its fruits, inevitably by late summer there would be swarms of wasps getting drunk off the rot. During the peak of summer, the box elder bugs would gather in the hundreds along the back blue wall of the house, trying to mate while dying of heat stroke. I would do my best to avoid their corpses when walking, as I felt sad to crush them in any way. 

My favorite part was the pond. Once you reached the opposite end of the yard from the house, there would be a barrier of strong grown cattails and water grass, and beyond that, a murky, duckweed covered pond. It was split into two sections by a small, rickety bridge painted white, and the lichen would climb up from the bottom and reach the rails.  

On hot summer days, my father would take an empty milk jug and cut off the top quarter, leaving behind the handle, and he would tell me to get some twine or yarn to tie onto the handle. We would go outside to his backyard, down the steps and towards the pond, and he would bend a path through the grass and the sticks for me to get close to the water without falling in. We would tie the twine to the support beams of the bridge, or sometimes just a couple sticks shoved into the dirt, and dunk the jugs into the water. It was important to make sure they didn’t get stuck or float away, but that they remained still in the shadowed areas of the pond. That was the key.  

After a few hours of running around outside, or maybe playing a game of HoMM3, we would go back to check on the jugs that would be filled with swimming, dancing tadpoles. 

I loved the feeling of sticking my hands in the cold water as the tadpoles raced around me. It was a ticklish, slimy feeling, and I remember my laughter from the first time I did it. I would scoop them up in my hands and watch them wriggle in the water, then slowly return them to their home. I would often then beg for him to find a fully grown frog for me, and he would always be able to. He couldn’t always catch them, but the man was a master at listening to the grass rustle in a slightly different manner than when the wind blew through. He would crouch, examine, then pounce and in his hands would be a very angry frog that he would then voice the complaints of. “I hate little girls and their tiny little hands,” he would grumble out, and I, without fail, would laugh all over again just like the first time he said it.  

My father always instilled in me to never play with wildlife for longer than they wanted, because I was much bigger and stronger than they were, and it was only fair to understand the power I held over them. After a few minutes, it was time to release the frogs, or the toads, or the tadpoles and let them live their life. I would then chase after the next creature I could get my hands on, often a grasshopper or a painted turtle, and he would sit down on a rusty lawn chair by the fire pit and watch.   

Beyond the pond was the woods. I wasn’t allowed to go back there without supervision, as it wasn’t his own, and he would warn me of the neighbors and their trigger happy fingers. I would narrate little adventures inspired by whatever book I was reading at the time as we walked through the trees, jumping on the log that had buried itself into the ground and examining the inside for mushrooms and bugs. My body was sticky with sunscreen and bug spray on those days. I would come back from our adventures and strip down in the bathroom, examining my body for ticks so I could peel them off and put them in a bowl for my father to crush afterwards. One day, I had walked through a swarm of gnats, and everywhere they bit me was swollen and tender to the touch. We applied even more bug spray after that. 

In the winter, we didn’t go outside much. We hibernated within the blue walls, playing old strategy games and watching movie marathons. I would eat my stove-warmed can of Chef Boyardee while sitting next to him, watching him play his current video game obsession. I watched fragments of episodes of ‘Lost’ while reading the same book that he’d bought me from a garage sale years ago, and I leaned against his strong arm when he drove me home Sunday afternoon. Those were also good times. 

When the snow melted and the sun began to color my skin with freckles though, that was when my chest grew with excitement, as I quickly grabbed a milk jug from the recycling bag and a roll of twine to bring to my father once more.