In the neighborhood

I saw five girls at my garden pond yesterday morning. Well, three, if you didn’t count their moms. And there was one boy, sitting in the grass and clover. Well, two, if I counted again.

The moms reminded me of girls when they were catching tadpoles with their knees on the stones and their hands in the water. And the tadpoles were smaller than watermelon seeds with wriggling tails.

How does it all work? I’ve walked around the block many times and I’ve read books, but when little girls are picking arugula and spinach and lettuce leaves in my garden and big girls are picking up little girls and a little boy like watermelons with wriggling legs and the sun is shining like a dandelion in a bright blue sky and the soil is black from the day before’s wind and rain and the green grass is so soft under bare feet… How does it all happen?

There must have been boys puffing out their throats and singing in a warming spring night. And we all had tails once upon a time and we wriggle what’s left of them without even hardly trying. And when we can’t hardly tell the boys from the girls in the dark or among the stones on the edge of a pond, it is not much more than a jumble of toad’s legs and what was left of those wriggling tails. What has been happening for a long, long, lime time, continues to happen again and again.

One plus one equals two. That much I get. But where does the love come from? What about all the love?

And now back up again one step or two. Yesterday morning I saw ten thousand tadpoles in my garden pond – if anyone had bothered to count. I couldn’t tell the boys from the girls with a ten foot microscope. And on top of the dark clear water reflecting the bright blue sky, there were five girls more or less. And tadpoles in and out of a silvery pie pan. And wriggling tails in cupped hands.

And laughter.

Old man Dylan explained some of it something like this when he was younger: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

The times have been changing here and there if you look closely, but they’ve never really been simple. Only a few tadpoles will end up as toads on the lawn. And only some toads will sing and some girls carry watermelons. And the love doesn’t just happen. Especially the love. My hunch is that the love increases in a more complicated way than the wriggling.

But I really haven’t seen how most of that goes. But yesterday morning I saw five girls catching tadpoles and later that day a girl I first saw thirty years ago came home from work and we had salads with spinach and lettuce and arugula. Well, I didn’t have arugula. Some boys and girls just don’t like the taste of that sharp tasting green. And coffee never stunted my growth because I don’t drink it, either

And I didn’t forget to mention the goldfish, but they are not gold. They’re orange. But they do have wriggling tails. I saw little ones swimming that I’m sure I didn’t put into that little pond so there must be some boys and girls. And when I bring out my father’s old microscope, I can see more wriggling in that pond water that my naked eye never before imagined.

So I still know only a little about boys and girls, but what I really cannot explain very well is why my wife loves arugula and me as much as she does.

I sang to her on a warming spring night long ago, but we didn’t have tadpoles until a few years ago. We do have a black and white cat with a slow wriggling fuzzy tail. Her name is Rita. I think you love what you can name, but sometime you only remember the faces. And when the names are more than the peony buds starting to bloom ahead of mother’s day this year and then there’s a bunny sitting in the clover… I have to wonder.

And did I forget to mention that we have had more than one generation of girls in our neighborhood? And we still do. I have seen and heard their names and their faces around my garden pond. And sometime tadpoles wriggle in a silvery pie pan.