As in:
What neither Kevin nor his grandfather could know is that Solomon Kepple was born a tadpole in the marshes of the Turtleback Hills.
This was centuries ago, before people got themselves complicated with everything from iron ships, to rubber wheels, to acid rain, to iPhones. These were really great times for amphibians and certainly a peak amphibian experience was the pre-larval stage where you and your developing gills and brain would just hang for days in a cloud of white, meringue-like egg mass with thousands of other pre-tadpoles.
Solomon had no direct memory of this, but the indirect memory, that would come to him in epic dreams, was astoundingly sublime. There was an innocence and serenity to being hatched in such a fashion and in some of the dreams travel was involved because warm winds would blow the egg colony in the waters along the shore, and you didn’t have to worry about food, or being late, or what to wear, or whatever you could possibly be missing in the way of a book or a play, or a concert. At night you could look up at the cosmos and just imagine that the egg colony was its own galaxy, on par with other distant lights. There was lots of time to imagine. Not a lot of time for stress. Not a lot of time to worry about herons, or frog commerce.
Childhood as a tadpole would be a hoot, too. But it was hard to top the deeply attached sensation of riding on the cloud of the iceberg egg mass, feeling the tingle of your cells dividing. Yeah, that was hard to beat.
No comments yet.