It was Mom who suggested I walk to the crick that morning. I knew she just wanted me out of her hair, but to entice me she had told me about when she and Aunt Jan were kids and had made a terrible, stinking mess trying to raise tadpoles from the crick in an old livestock trough by the back fence. Mom had grown up in the same little brick house we lived in now, with her grandparents next door in the big white house where mine now lived. I always liked the stories of the animals they used to raise—farm dogs for sale as a side-business, a crow Jan trained to talk, baby raccoons they nursed with a bottle until they grew to wash their apples cutely in little bowls of water (before scratching the hell out of Mom). The stories were always cautionary (runts of the litter will die, so don’t get attached), often ended badly (rashes, worms, rabies shots), and tended to impart a moral (and that is why you don’t play with raccoons). But Mom did suggest I go to the crick, and had told me about her tadpoles, and I had raised a buckeye moth from a caterpillar in a jar, hatched chicken eggs in a lightbulb incubator. And there was an old barrel out in the weeds behind the empty hog pen.

I found my mother sorting laundry in the cool of the basement. I was panting and bent over with a stitch in my side from running back up the road, through the windbreak, over the gate, around the garden, and across the lawn to the door to the mud room.

“Mom!” I gasped.

“What!?” she mimicked my tone in mock breathlessness, smirking, without taking her eyes from ironing Dad’s dress shirts.

“There are tadpoles down there!” I told her about my plan. She put a shirt on a hanger and reached for another.

“No hon, I’m sorry, but I told you about what a mess it made when Jan and I tried that as a kid. They just don’t survive in a feed trough, they like streams, there’s nothing for them to eat, they just die—”

“But the encyclopedia said they eat algae, and I saw algae down there, I’ll bring that too, and the water will be deeper in the barrel, and I won’t get too many, and—”

“Even in nature, hon, most tadpoles don’t live, they get sick, or other things eat them, or the crick dries up—”

“If they’d just die anyway, then maybe I could save them! Please, Mom, please?” She had finished hanging the shirts, and I stood blocking the doorway as she lifted the laundry basket. She sighed.