It’s ridiculously exciting to watch metamorphosis in real time. The tadpoles are growing daily, some subtly assuming a slightly froggy shape, with proto-eyes apparent and coloring shifting from black to mottled. I couldn’t get close enough this morning. The chair was too far away, standing on the edge of the pond too far away, so I sat down on the flagstone rim and dropped my hot feet into the cool, clear, water. Grateful for the ability to do so, albeit a little awkwardly, but completely without pain or trepidation.

Unanticipated delight: a couple of intrepid tadpoles nibbled on my dried out old hide. I couldn’t feel it, of course, but I can imagine they were gobbling up those skin flakes with their tiny teeth… A vision began to take shape, where people pay a hundred dollars to dangle their feet in the pond and let the tadpoles gently exfoliate them, just like at a ‘fish spa.’ Haha.

Imagine if all ten thousand tadpoles transform into frogs! There would be no room in the pond for me! I’m grateful to have Captain Amphibian on call to hold my hand through the suspenseful developments down at the pond. He assured me that garter snakes would show up to manage the tadpole population, and indeed, I saw the first one last evening, though it escaped my camera.

Meanwhile, in other news, I’ve harvest a few cups of snow peas this week, a fennel bulb, several hefty lettuces, and a couple of meals worth of kale. Grasshopper mitigation is holding steady for now. If only life were this simple and sweet! This is how I want to spend the days of my elder years, my evenings of writing about gratitude, joy, mindfulness. I wish I could stop this post here, with the rhubarb-strawberry-lemonade soda I made yesterday.

But I can’t. I can’t sit by and not raise my voice about the patently illegal performative cruelties this traitorous president is inflicting on people in “the land of the free.” If only his supporters could, would, see clearly that the atrocities he carries out daily will ultimately harm them as well. His latest just boggles my mind:

“Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump. The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers.”

The Guardian, June 16, 2025

Let us not suffer from a failure of imagination. There’s only one reason I can imagine for this unfathomable order: He intends to split the armed services in two, into his supporters and Others, turn them against each other based on political affiliation. Your imagination can take over from there. I hope tomorrow I wake up to see that every active duty military officer is screaming from the tops of their lungs about this, as I feel like doing; that every veteran in every branch of the US Armed Forces from Army privates to Navy admirals and everyone in between can see this for what it is, a heinous wedge, and vociferously reject this decree and the megalomaniac who proclaimed it.