Now that I know where and how to look for them they’re all over the pond, in various colors with tails of various lengths. I saw one kick through the water like a grownup without any tail, too fast to catch on camera. This little one hung out under the rush flower for a long time—see the nubbin of tail? The rest of it already metabolized. And then the shot of the day, below.
It’s been such a joyful journey to watch these little creatures grow. I’ve felt like I had a pretty good handle on their development, checking on them a couple of times a day, noticing the first tiny hind legs developing, and then seeing the forelegs on a few yesterday. I sent a picture to Dr. Amphibian, and he asked if any were coming out of the water onto land yet. Well I think not, I thought, If I’m just now seeing the forelegs, but I didn’t say so. I’m learning.
As I was leaving pondwatch last evening, there was a flicker in the rushes, a hint of a hop, and it was gone before I could be sure, but I thought I saw a froglet! A baby garter snake also escaped my camera; thinner than a pencil and quick it slithered off the flagstone and swam across the pond to disappear into the rushes.
Pondering what my friend had asked me, I came down to the pond this morning with fresh eyes, a shift in perspective. I looked more closely into the marshy ground with an open mind. These curly rushes over the years have grown roots to the bottom of the pond and created their own little land masses. When I noticed a baby frog right away, I had to laugh at my hubris, to think that in my couple of superficial visits a day I was keeping up with their development!
I knew the tadpoles had been clustering around the edges of the rushes for a week or two, but I hadn’t thought to inspect the rushes themselves for froglets. I only saw the tadpoles who swam away from the edges when Wren or I came close enough to disturb them.
There are still five or six adult frogs hanging around, some as big as the palm of my hand.
But the froglets, they’re only the size of one thumb joint—and yet perfectly formed complete miniatures of their parents! I only saw half a dozen, but now I know how well they hide I’m sure there are far more than I counted. The habitat is perfect for them: the rushes are partially submerged, providing a lattice over pockets of warm shallow water. As they make their metabolic transition from herbivores to carnivores, they can find the exact niche they need in any moment somewhere in the spongy rush islands, and when they’re completely transformed into froglets they can climb all the way out.
Seeing one perching on a lily pad was absolutely the best part of my day.
The pond is rich in other lives as well. Dragonflies, damselflies, water bugs, spiders, and apparently enough tiny animals to feed a thousand froglets. I’m profoundly grateful for the way each day enhances my perspective.
Despite experiencing joy anyway, I often feel wracked with guilt that I’m not making more noise about the corruption unraveling our democracy, not doing more to raise the alarm, not making enough people wake up. It’s because I can’t say it as well as others, and I don’t even want to know about it. But we all must know. If you get a little delight or insight or respite from reading this blog, or even if you don’t, you also need to be paying attention to the political machinations that are demolishing American life as we have known it all our lives. Please keep reading, now, the words of Mark Elias, who likens what’s happening in the US with the musical Cabaret: As a populace, we are sleeping amid our pleasures while the Nazis take over.
| POLITICIZATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE: The DOJ is now a political arm of the GOP |
| I know I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating: under Pam Bondi’s leadership, the Department of Justice is a political arm of the GOP, and the attorney general is Trump’s personal lawyer. Right now, we’re seeing that clearly with the Epstein Files saga. As the MAGA base calls for the release of the files, Bondi is protecting Trump — not representing the American people. This will only get worse. If you want to see where the DOJ’s loyalties lie, keep an eye on Bondi. |
| TARGETING OPPONENTS: Threatening those who oppose the administration |
| On Friday, as part of her latest conspiracy, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard promised to investigate and prosecute Obama administration officials for their disclosure of Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Then on Sunday, Trump followed up her warning with an AI-generated TikTok of President Obama getting arrested by the FBI. This is just another in a long series of threats to political opponents — and it should be taken seriously. With the DOJ acting as Trump’s political weapon, it will go after and prosecute those who defy and speak out against the administration. Don’t dismiss these threats. |
| UNCONSTITUTIONAL ACTS: Betraying and defying the Constitution |
| Under Trump, the Constitution has become nothing more than a suggestion. Administration officials have been defying court orders left and right, ignoring judges of both parties. Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal lawyer and his nominee to serve on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, told government lawyers they should say “fuck you” to court orders. And back in March, the administration defied Judge Boasberg’s orders to turn a plane of Venezuelan immigrants around. The administration isn’t following the normal rules. There are no guardrails. Pay attention to who they’re taking orders from — because it’s certainly not our justice system. |
| ELECTION MEDDLING: Interfering with the outcome and results of our elections |
| Trump and the Republican Party are gearing up for 2026. They know their policies are unpopular. They know the Epstein Files have them in hot water. So, what are they going to do? Gerrymander and suppress voters. In Texas, Trump pressured Gov. Greg Abbott to hold a special session and illegally gerrymander his state’s congressional map. And in Colorado, election officials received calls from a GOP operative asking to inspect election machines and gain access to voter rolls. The 2026 election isn’t going to be a normal one. Get registered now. Double-check your registration. Make a plan to vote. When democracy is on the line, it’s never too early. |
If you’ve made it this far, please keep reading the clarion call from Joyce Vance about the war on women:
“When we said women and people who loved them needed to vote like their lives depended on it in 2024, it wasn’t hyperbole. Despite the hole the Dobbs case, which reversed Roe v. Wade, tore in the heart of so many Americans and the women who have suffered and even died since then from the unavailability of basic medical care, not enough Americans understood how precarious the world had become for women….
Trump is waging war on women in ways both big and small, subtle and obvious. When federal employees are fired, women lose jobs that permit them to support their families. When Medicaid gets cut, single moms, who are just trying to get by, are burdened. DEI gave woman a path to higher paying jobs. Now it’s being closed down. He’s trying to make it harder for us to votewith his Executive Order on voting and the SAVE Act.
But above all, it’s been abortion, the right that both kept women safe and made it possible for them to set the course of their own lives and families. This is an administration that not only wants to end abortion, but has also set its sights on contraception. There is talk of resurrecting the Comstock Actwith the complicity of the Supreme Court. That would make it illegal to mail material that talks about family planning, let alone the drugs like mifepristone that are essential for medication abortion. That means women who need access to medical care to prevent serious infection or death due to medical complications in pregnancy may no longer be able to get it.
The party that claims to be pro-life isn’t. It’s not just the misbegotten refusal to provide abortion, which can be lifesaving in a pregnancy gone wrong. The culture war against women is in full-blown progress.
But now in Tennessee, they’re taking it a little bit further. Unmarried? Pregnant? Sorry, no healthcare for you. According to footage shown by the Tennessee Holler, an unmarried woman who was pregnant was denied medical care by a doctor who didn’t want to treat her. She didn’t want an abortion. She wanted to carry the baby to term. He denied her care because she wasn’t married. It offended his Christian beliefs. We’ve heard about Christian bakers not wanting to bake cakes for gay couples. This is the next logical step in the Supreme Court’s permissive politics towards Christianity. Except that this doctor seems to have forgotten that Mary was an unmarried, pregnant woman when Jesus was conceived.
Apparently, the Hippocratic oath no longer matters, at least not if your patient is an unmarried woman who’s pregnant. Women in Tennessee have sufferedin the past for being denied an abortion while carrying a nonviable pregnancy, only to lose their fertility as a result. But this is next level. This is a doctor denying a patient care because he, HE, doesn’t approve of the way she is choosing to live her life.
We have the opportunity to end this now. There is an election coming in 2026. An election where we will have to fight to register, stay registered, vote, and ensure our votes get counted. But it’s our fight. It’s the fight for democracy. Unlike 2024, when Americans failed to vote in sufficient numbers to keep Trump out of office because they somehow didn’t understand the stakes, we have to make sure every single person who cares about our country—and thinks women shouldn’t slide into second-class citizenship where they can be denied basic, noncontroversial medical care—is on the front lines in this election. In 2024, too many people thought they could use their voice to protest, whatever the issue, by staying home or voting for a candidate other than the one committed to democracy. The results have been tragic, just six months into Donald Trump’s second administration. It’s dangerous to be a woman. It’s dangerous to be an immigrant. It’s dangerous to be a member of the LGBTQ community. It’s dangerous to be someone who has devoted your life to government service if your work involved investigating Donald Trump or promoting DEI. It’s now dangerous to fall outside of Trumpism’s rigid definition of what’s right…. That’s wrong for all of us.”
And that’s my rant for the week, with deep gratitude for the big, courageous voices on the national stage who are shining the bright light of reality, of truth, clearly on the haze of deception, propaganda, brainwashing, and large-scale swindling that defines the current regime. Time really is running out, and we’ve got to wake up and really drain the cesspool before we drown in it. We can do it! Here are links to some other people’s words, newsletters and articles, to help us wake up and be a proactive citizen.
I’ll be back in a day or two to help us relax and savor the quotidian delights in our private lives.
Let’s get the food shot out of the way first, because simple and delicious though this lunch was, it wasn’t the highlight of the day. Pretty much the same thing as the past two days, except with havarti instead of cheddar, no egg, and some chopped tomato and apricot included with the onion greens pesto, mayo, and bean mashup. I’m grateful I’ve learned that good food doesn’t have to be complicated, fancy, or difficult.
And in fire news, it was mostly cloudy with some drizzles today which must have helped the firefighters across the western slope a lot, and certainly made for a more comfortable day for those of us with challenging lungs.
But for today’s big JOY: I was beside myself this afternoon to discover that some of the tadpoles have actual legs! At last!
I needed a second opinion, so I asked Topaz to investigate since she could get closer to the water than I could. She confirmed my assessment, and suggested I bring down the husband camera.
Husband camera confirmed, and I was especially delighted to catch this one with just the bare beginnings of legs. Most of those I observed tonight, maybe three percent of all the tadpoles, had slightly better developed legs than this one.
As though mama is keeping tabs… As far as I know, each of these images is of a different tadpole. I’m grateful for the gift of being able to observe the miracle of metamorphosis in real time in my own backyard.
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.”
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.
I’m grateful for the kindness of neighbors this weekend. I needed to borrow bacon for Zoom Cooking with Amy, so I called over to Pork Central and while I was there picking up bacon I borrowed a hummingbird feeder. I had to take down the oriole feeder they were using because the holes are too big and too many native bees were drowning in the nectar; these hummers are territorial, and kept coming back to the empty hook admonishing me.
Today I realized I wouldn’t have enough bird seed for the new feeder to last until the sacks I ordered from Grand Junction arrived, so I called the Hitching Post in town to check their holiday hours. “We’re actually closed today and tomorrow,” she said, “but what can I do for you?” I told her I was out of bird seed and I thought they were feeding babies, but they could wait a couple of days. She said she’d be downstairs for a little while if I wanted to come get some. This great little store I’ve mentioned before, always has one of anything you could possibly need, and they were so generous to open for a moment for me today. I thanked her profusely, and gave her a hunk of Teddy Roosevelt clove cake I’d baked last night when I picked up the seed.
I’ve been grateful watching the frogs’ eggs develop day by day, the little black blobs taking the shape of tadpoles. My calculations were off, though: I didn’t expect them to start hatching until tomorrow, but they actually started Thursday night. I spent all day Friday watching and filming, and got a good first-sunburn-of-the-season to show for it. Since then I’ve been wearing long sleeves, and watching in awe as the egg mass empties one cell at a time.
The tiny tadpoles break free of the mass and spin around for a minute before latching onto the curly rushes with their tiny teeth. Over the past few days one nest has emptied almost completely, and the other larger nest is more than halfway done hatching. Video to come.
I’m grateful for sunshine on red flowers in the dry woods. The other evening this patch of scarlet gilia caught my eye as we walked toward home on the Breakfast Loop. Then this evening we chose to walk the Medium Loop to the canyon, and a flash of red drew me up off the trail into a cactus patch.
The prickly pears aren’t blooming yet but the claret cups are! It feels early, they used to bloom in June. In just the few moments after my first glimpse from the trail, clouds moved in and shadowed the flowers’ glow by the time I reached them.
Along the rim the little buckwheats are in bloom. Most of them are cream colored but there are a few with this sweet rosy hue. And farther along, another sunlit glimpse, another cluster of claret cups peeking out.
By the time we reached the cactus patch along the main trail home, the one I always try to catch in bloom, the sun had dipped low behind deep clouds. But now I know they’re all blooming I’ll be out again tomorrow chasing that little thrilling flash of red through the trees.
A mystery encountered: many small limbs broken off a young piñon pine. I didn’t stop long enough to look for tracks or fur, but I’ll check again well before dusk tomorrow. It doesn’t look like buck damage but it could be; or it could have been done by a bear. Or who knows? The forest is full of wild things.