Image by Dev Kamath
The Legwork of Raising Tadpoles I described it as torture to my mother, listening to the neighbor’s kids splash and yell in their pools; a staple of South Carolina backyards used to survive the hellish summers. Our own pool sat in disarray for as long as I could remember, filled with leaves and other indiscernible gunk. Perhaps my exaggeration was enough to spark the renovation. The next thing I knew, the pool was drained of the murky rainwater, and cleaning supplies were delivered at the doorstep. On the morning of July 30, my assignment to clean the waterline 18
Elizabeth Clapp
tile quickly turned into toad roundup duty, as I found a number of them hiding under a tarp in the pool. That’s not all they were up to. I also discovered thousands of eggs floating in the shallow rainwater that had collected overnight. It was necessary to drain the water to continue fixing the pool, but I wanted to give some of the eggs a chance, partially out of curiosity of the metamorphosis process and partially out of guilt for having to cut the lives of many potential toads short. Perhaps it was also fate that I would be attending school remotely, so I knew
