The June that I was eight was hot and wet, and the thick grass was sodden with dew each morning. The heat rose in waves by ten and piled into thunderheads all afternoon. I had explored every old tin-roofed shed on the farm, built a lean-to fort of scrap metal with a padded floor of alfalfa against the railroad ties stacked behind the arborvitae. I had climbed through the cabs of the Steiger and the combine, unused in the machine shed while the men dragged cultivators through the corn and beans. One day, I climbed the tallest tree on our land, the giant white pine in the front yard that had been scarred, twice, by lightning. Standing in its highest crux, eighty feet above the ground, I could see over our woods and the gently rolling hills of the neighbors’ alfalfa to the corn and soybeans and zig-zagging grass waterways clear to the horizon. Suddenly weak, I stared at the pine’s thick bark for a full minute before forcing my body to climb carefully down. It wasn’t the height that got me; it was the bigness, the sky.

The last time the crick had not run dry by summer I had been too young to take the quarter-mile walk alone. Now I was bare and blond under the sun and my Keds scrunched the small ground gravel along the shoulder. I placed foot after foot down the hill, to where the crick ran from our waterway through the culvert under the road and met the drainage from our neighbors’ pasture on the other side. The wilderness of grass and cattails bit hard against my legs and shoulders as I climbed down the steep ditch. Red-winged Blackbirds made me duck, and for a second I looked back up the road to the farm. But then I carefully worked my way over the barbed-wire fence into the waterway. The cows were black and big, but far enough away, and here a small pool undercut the dense grass and black soil.

Tadpoles writhed like meaty commas in the water. I tried to catch them. Tried, stopped, watched, tried again. And then I had one, wriggling slimy in my cupped hands. It looked just like a picture from some science filmstrip, but with shiny eyes and flexing gills, its tail translucent on the edges with spots and veins. Its struggles tickled my fingers. I dropped it back in the pool, and ran back to the house.