Climbing the Hill

Remember that place when we were kids, where we found pond of tadpoles and try to catch them. They were fast, too fast even for the fastest of kids. We had our pants rolled up but they still got wet and my mom wondered where we were. We lied, not to lie, but to keep it a secret; our little pond of tadpoles.
Now when I think of that pond, I can imagine being fast enough to catch the tadpoles, but they are no longer tadpoles now, they have grown, transformed, and are adults now. Frogs don’t swim fast enough; they hop on the ground, having little memory of what life is like in the water. There is no challenge in catching frogs, but I catch one anyways. He doesn’t pee in my hands like my 3rd grade teacher told me, he just sits there waiting, calmly and carelessly. What fear must I strike in his frog-size heart, such fear to freeze a great forest frog in the winter only to thaw out in spring, alive again, hopping again? Here in my hands he just looks over this gigantic cliff above his world, seeing the tadpoles swim, seeing his kids grow, grow until they’re frogs too, up here the view is amazing, he is calm and careless, he sees beyond the pond, beyond the grass, and no longer dreams of the outside, his eyes are seeing a life beyond the pond.