“Okay. If it’ll get you out of my way. But you’re doing this on your own. If you make a mess, you’re cleaning it up yourself, this is your responsibility, no one is going to help you, you understand?”

Kneeling in the rough dusty rushes of the crick, I filled six empty plastic milk jugs one by one with brown water, algae, and tadpoles. I loaded the jugs into my wagon and pulled it clattering back up the road, through the back gate, into the yard. I rolled the metal barrel behind the old feed mill, the corncrib, past the grain bins and the dryers, up the gravel back drive past the duck pens into the back yard. I filled the barrel half way with water from the garden hose. I emptied the tadpole jugs into the barrel.

The next weeks I watched what tadpoles do. They darted near the surface, and hovered with their tails barely twitching. They grazed my fingertips when I held my hand still in the water, and zipped away when I curled my fingers, reaching. I put an old window screen over the barrel, for shade. Occasionally I tossed in a handful of grass gone to seed, thinking maybe they’d like that. In the mornings I’d lift the screen and check the tadpoles, standing on tiptoe to lean my face close to the water. Some of them were changing, growing legs with their tails still waving, their heads shrinking, giving way to bodies. I checked them first thing each day.

One cool morning after a heavy rain, I lifted the screen and a toad hopped onto my wrist.

It was smaller than a penny, grey-green against the pink of my skin. It squatted, still, new, with barely a nub of a tail, and tiny folded rear legs, tiny little toes. It had a set of bumps on its hips and by its shoulders. There were tiny spots in rows between the ridges between the bumps. Its forelegs curled around my thin blond arm hair. Its mouth was small, a distinct white throat. Pinprick nostrils, and black shiny eyes. It was a discrete, whole, other life. I watched it blink.

I propped up the old screen with a stick from the white pine, notched the gnarled limb into a dent in the bottom of the barrel. There were more tadpoles still swimming, with shorter tails but real legs, arms, toad heads. I thought they could climb up the stick and jump out when they were ready. I thought they would escape to the garden.