Curbside

There are tadpoles in the street.

We go and get them. Some of them, we go and get. Not all of them, for there are many thousands of tadpoles or maybe more. I don’t know. I cannot be expected to count all of the tadpoles.

It seems a strange place for tadpoles to be, doesn’t it? Yet they are there every year. First, the rains come and then when they go, they leave small puddles behind, right up against the curb.

This is where the tadpoles are.

We always go and get them. There is never a year when we don’t go and get them. We did not go and get them in 2011. This was owing to the rains not having come.

They are not just any tadpoles, these street tadpoles of ours. I call them Super-Quick-Changers. A week is all it takes and Boom! Tiny toads for all to see. I have arrived at an uneducated, unscientific theory regarding this and it is this: Micro-evolution. Yes, micro-evolution right here on my street. Only a tadpole transforming in record time, in the blink of an eye before the puddle dries up, lives to grow up and have tadpoles of her own.

There you have it. Generation after generation of exponentially superer Super-Quick-Changers.

I was out in the street last week scooping up this year’s batch.

A young girl stood across the street from me. Bucket in hand. Mother at her side. Watching. She said, “Mom! That lady is getting all of the GOOD ones!”

It was true.

I’d left her with nothing but cripples and runts – poor, malformed little things destined to loaf in a circle and die.

The girl should have got out here sooner.

I’ve been doing this for longer than she’s even been alive.