New moon in Leo, good people. Lions waking up from naps. Thinking about their days. Making lion plans.
Today’s sense-braid features a piquing visual that happens to be the byproduct of some anxious near-rage, music that stretches into and illuminates the subconscious like mycelium in the earth, and a lavender hydrosol recipe to refresh trust in the self and the world.
Vision
And: frogs laying eggs in backyard pools.
This is my pool. It is ridiculous, as is its backstory.
My son and I had plans to have some dear friends over on Memorial Day. The day before was rough. Various household appliances broke. I took him to a pool party at his classmate’s house instead of fixing them. I spoke with nice adults I didn’t know for two hours, which cranked up my anxiety to about a 9.1 of 10, as it always does (by no fault of the nice adults; I just simmer with freakish angst beneath my well-worn ability to feign conversational ease).
Then, my post-chatting tendency to space out led me to take a wrong turn on our way home, and I got very frustrated. And I was hot. And my son had to pee. And we were within range of the wail of Wal-Mart, behemoth roadside siren. Wail-Mart.
A ferocious need to Purchase Some Joy came over me.
We needed a pool, even if it was a plastic bag on sticks. My son was beside himself as I selected the hardiest-looking plastic bag on sticks, despite misgivings from a bystander who said I would never be able to put it together by myself. The bystander smiled. I smiled back at him and helped an employee load it onto a rolling cart. It probably weighed 80 pounds. We stuffed it into the back of the car with the help of two other people, and when we got it home, it took me 20 minutes to wiggle it out of the car and onto our red wagon to pull it into the backyard.
After three hours of pouring sweat, spitting retorts to the memory of the bystander, and biting curse words off in the middle, I stuck the garden hose in the assembled pool and started filling it. We all floated around in it on Memorial Day for about half an hour.
It is now a repository for hundreds—thousands?—of frog eggs. And my thoughts have gone something like this:
One frog can lay thousands of eggs in a single cycle. A male frog will need to come along and fertilize them. Are male frogs hopping into this pool? Wait, are these eggs going through the pool filter? Shit, they are going through the pool filter. There are crystal-clear, gelatinous stalactites of egg sacs clinging to the accordion of filter paper. Bah. I’ll turn off the filter, see if any tadpoles emerge after a few days. Nope, no tadpoles. But algae. Lots of algae. Shit. Okay. Well, there are no more eggs, so… pool chemicals. Chlorine, water clarifier, algae killer, metal-out. Clear water!
More eggs.
I will relocate them. I will put them low to the ground so that they can be fertilized. What kind of container is attractive to frogs? I’m overthinking this. Shallow, translucent plastic tub. Scoops of brush and leaves around it. Shade. Alright, eggs. Good luck.
Did I purchase joy? Did I purchase more of my own anxious impulse to always be planning and helping (AKA controlling)—a beautifully clear, aqua-toned cylinder of it? Did I expect to do something other than that?
Do tadpoles need a certain amount of room to swim? What if they’re fertilized but then they can’t grow in the tub?
Stop, Bird.
Wait, the creek is about 1/3 of an acre back. I’ll just walk the tub back there and pour them into it, then I can stop. The tub is heavy, but I can do it. Of course, it will only be fair if I relocate all of the eggs. Might be a few trips back there each week. That’s fine.
Funny, that’s where I spent those weeks relocating the mice who lived in my cupboards. Blue Tail. I named her that after I colored her tail blue with a Sharpie to see if she came back to the kitchen. She did—the very next day.
I wonder what happened to her, kind of like how I wonder what ever happened to, say, the kid who got kicked out of my first grade class for refusing to stop singing Bad to the Bone every day. Thomas. Thomas and Blue Tail and now a bunch of pre-tadpoles. Moving forward into the murk, trusting, raging, urgently howling songs.