It was the summer Mom returned to work full-time in the city, a 45-minute drive away, and I found myself temporarily untethered. 

I was only seven at the time, yet I remember this epoch of innocence, with its newfound freedom, as the time when I discovered how the earth could hold me.

It was the latchkey summer when I would awaken early and pedal my royal blue, banana-seat bike as fast as my spindly legs could spin up the big hill towards Halfmoon Lake. Sometimes I would stop at my best friend’s house on the corner at the top of the hill before rounding the bend enroute to my grandmother’s cottage, where I was to spend my days until school began again. 

That same friend’s Dutch Reformed father, a lay minister, baptized me against my will in the name of Jesus Christ in the lake’s leech-infested waters by forcing my head below the pond-scum surface. Instead of feeling consecrated and reborn, I felt as though I had been dipped in fluorescent green phlegm. 

Weeks later, my friend’s teen brother, the one I would sit next to in church, approached his sister and me on a hot and listless day when the only movements we could muster involved swatting mosquitoes and making footprint designs on the dirt road with our bare feet. Together with his friend, he coaxed us into an abandoned A-frame cabin to eat stolen candy and play games. Games like house and you be the mommy, and hide and seek in the loft, and kiss but don’t tell and touch me here and shush, don’t squirm. 

Her brother pinned me beneath him, stifling my silent scream with his slimy mouth. The fossilized smell of musty sleeping bags, cigarette breath, baby oil, and semen still lingers in my nostrils.

It was the summer of oppressive heat, storm clouds, and shadow desires. In the weeks following these assaults, my daily explorations were closer afield, beckoning me to the back forty wetlands behind our barn and along the trampled grassland trail that led to our small slough. 

At first, I ventured there because I heard the croaking of frogs not quite in unison. But soon, I began to lend ritual to these visits, bringing old coffee canisters or canning jars half-filled with water, holes poked in the lids. I’d tote our set of wheat-colored Tupperware cups and the torn metal strainer my mother used for boiled potatoes. The jagged tear made it tricky to catch the smaller frogs but sometimes luck was with me and they’d get stuck in the ripped netting.

I found the easiest way to catch them was with my bare hands. Stealth was paramount, as was patience. Sometimes, I’d sit for a long while with a wiggling frog trapped between my cupped hands, just so I could feel it tickle my palms with its smothered jerks. But there were days, too many of them, when I’d squeeze them just to feel their pulses quicken and bellies squish against the gaps of my clasp, their tiny ribbits a murmur of their former songs.

 I loved creating container habitats for each one. Some lived on the bedding of mud, grass, and dandelions. Others boasted a décor of clover weeds, strawberries, and field mushrooms. A few scant frogs were treated to a carpet of birch bark shavings and straw. My terrariums would start this way until I added water, after which they became a murky menagerie of earth matter and floating frogs.

Early on, I discovered that it took a small village of insects to feed a frog. I rose to the occasion. Each day after capturing a new batch, I would forage for frog food wherever I could find it. Half-dead flies on hot window ledges, slow-moving Daddy-longlegs, ladybugs, moths, worms, caterpillars, mosquitos, ants, and dragonflies were all part of the varied diet I fed them.

By the end of August, I had depleted my mother’s entire canning jar set for my specimen collection of nearly five dozen frogs. I kept them lined up along the shady strip of tall grass at the back of the barn and rearranged them at the end of each day based on their captivity status and energy level. I moved those displaying a hint of fight-or-flight spunk to the left and shifted my late-stage hospice patients to the right. I made sure to check on my outdoor laboratory pets each morning in case any had died overnight. If they did, I was secretly relieved because it meant I could trap more.

I didn’t want summer to end. I delighted in being an apex predator at the hub of so much life and death. My outdoor lab obsession came to an abrupt halt though, shortly before school started, when Mom told me to release the few frogs I had managed to keep alive.

“You need to let them go,” she said.

“But Mom! They’re mine now. I adopted them!”

“I know, honey,” Mom nodded. “But they don’t belong with you. They belong in their own natural habitat.”