Dip into Your Story Hatchery Where Memories Transform into Narratives
Rediscover the Events That Shaped You and Watch Them Take Shape
The algae seemed to tremble, teeming with life as a million wriggling commas squirmed against the masses of thick green muck that lined the edge of the pond.
Every other weekend or so, my parents would drive us to the farm they owned, about 30 minutes from our house in town. We had to show up more frequently in spring and summer to push back against nature’s tendency to grow, multiply, and expand.
To cut the overgrown weeds and sprawling brush, Dad hopped on the Ford 8N tractor and pulled the bush hog—a type of huge rotary cutter designed to handle heavy vegetation and awkward terrain. My mom tidied up the trailer while my brother either read a copy of Mad Magazine or mowed around the old log cabin with a push mower.
My job was to stay out of the way of all moving parts, so I read Richie Rich comic books until Dad was done mowing around the pond, then I would walk along the water’s edge hoping to spot tadpoles. In late spring and early summer, they hatched by the hundred-thousands, or as it seemed to me, by the millions. I would crouch down and stare, mesmerized.
I begged Mom to let me take some home, so she found two old plastic milk jugs and dipped one into the silty pond water. The tadpoles tried to scatter, but as the water rushed in, at least two dozen tadpoles would ride strands of slimy algae into the container. She filled a second jug to have extra water and algae back home. Why couldn’t we use water from home? The tadpoles needed pond water, she explained. It has all the nutrients they need to eat and drink and grow.
After our day at the farm, we rode down winding country roads in the evening light, and I stared at the milk jug balanced on my thin bare legs. The water shifted back and forth with every turn; I tried to minimize turbulence for my tiny charges, marveling at the thought that these small creatures would be in my care until they fully transformed from these relatively shapeless, formless tadpoles, into froglets—frog-shaped with lingering tails—all the way into adorable tiny frogs.
Back at home, Mom brought up from the basement our small aquarium, purchased for gerbils that lived their lifespan and had been lovingly buried by the back fence a few months earlier. She set the heavy glass container on the picnic table and filled it with the pond water, gently pouring out the tadpoles and algae, hoping she’d scooped up enough of whatever the little creatures needed to stay alive for the few weeks they’d be at our house.
I sat on the bench and studied them closely to spot changes — and each morning I’d note a tiny difference. Day after day, the little commas become less spastic and more graceful, using their long tails to propel themselves around the four walls of their aquarium. I’d gaze at them in the soft morning light and drop by again in the afternoons after playing with the neighbors. Mom instructed me to add more pond water regularly, so I’d pour in more water and algae.
Some didn’t make it. I mourned and worried that they would all suffer and die under my watch. Thankfully, most continued to flourish. In time, small nubs showed up on each of the tadpoles — the start of their back legs. Those grew longer and more leg-like, adding spurts of power to their movement. Little front legs began to appear and the rounded bodies formed slight curves; their oversized heads became more shapely.
Weeks passed and I watched their bodies mature into a more frog-shaped form, though their tails persisted, adding balance, perhaps, as they swam from one side of the aquarium to the other.
Mom must have known it was time to alter the habitat. She found gravel and rocks, and we created a high and dry side that gave them the option of spending time outside the water.
In time, most of the tadpoles appeared fully grown and no longer needed their tails. They’d changed color into green frogs and we agreed to return these plucky amphibians to the pond at the farm the following weekend.
That splashing stage of fertility — the million commas stage — is nature’s hatchery, where life unfolds from masses of eggs, and creatures emerge through metamorphosis.
We can watch so many things emerge and evolve if we pay attention, like I did as a child perched on that picnic table. We can bear witness to transformation happening all around us, marveling at what we’re privileged to behold.
We can look back, as well.
Inside each of us are a million memories, wriggling in the story hatchery of our murky minds. If we take time to reach down and scoop them up, we’ll find we have an abundance of ideas to explore and countless stories to write. Some are wriggling out of reach, but stay still. In the quiet, you can gather them up and give them time and space to emerge.
Inside each of us are a million memories, wriggling in the story hatchery of our murky minds.
Imagine how fertile the ecosystem is inside you and how many memories you can funnel into words! The first recollections you encounter may be no more shapely than a tadpole with its rounded black body and long tail. It’s tempting to accept that as the only detail we can recall, blaming the passage of time for the lack of clarity.
If we stay with it, however, and give it time to develop, we remember more.
We recall another image, another sensory detail . . .
. . . algae spread out in the water in full, hospitable blobs for tadpoles to call home but when pulled from the water and onto the sand, they collapse into long, inelegant slimy strands.
. . . froglets swimming in short, jerky movements.
. . . a tiny frog on a rock, its fresh green skin glistening in the spring sunlight.
Your memories are available to be scooped up and nurtured. We aren’t writing out of scarcity, friend. We write out of abundance—we are large; we contain multitudes.
Stories rarely hatch fully formed. When I sit with them long enough and give them time to develop, they grow legs. They take shape.
In time, our stories mature, ready to stand on their own, each one a shiny, astonishing contribution to this wild world where someone waits to sit and take it all in . . . and share it with the world.
What happened to my frogs?
We returned to the farm, the frogs in jars this time, I think, or maybe a round goldfish bowl covered in Saran wrap held tight with a rubber band around the rim—some smaller container more suitable for travel than the aquarium.
The metamorphosis took so long for my childlike sense of time, and yet it also happened fast. Here we were just a few weeks later with fully formed critters so different from those legless blobs that had helplessly sloshed into the empty milk jugs.
I climbed out of the car carefully, moving in slow motion through the long grass toward the pond, knowing this was the end of the experiment, a farewell to these visitors who stayed with me in town and now needed to return home. Did these baby frogs hear their siblings and cousins chirping and splashing as we approached?
I crouched at the murky water’s edge as I did just a few weeks earlier and when I said, “Okay, little guys…” I heard a thousand plunks as frogs that had been perched on the side of the pond dove to safety, plopping into the pond, hidden in the shadows from me, an intruder. Even though I’d also been a midwife and caretaker for the tiny frogs I was returning to their homeland, I couldn’t be trusted by them as a whole.
I opened the container and tilted it where there was a bit of sand. My frogs popped out like popcorn kernels, hopping tentatively on their new legs, then springing toward the others, leaping and plunging into the ecosystem they were made for.
One after another swam along the edge, drawing their hind legs up and kicking them back, a bit of tail hanging onto the hindquarters of a few late bloomers. They no longer needed a tail to propel them into their world. They had everything they needed to transition back into the place where their lives originated, where they would join the chorus of peepers that thrilled and trilled alongside their parents who croaked the bass line of their shared song.
Peepers offered strong vocals in our farm’s spring song, part of the soundtrack of my childhood. Decades later I can picture them in my mind’s eye — I can hear them, too — and they awaken something deep within me, because I participated in their change during those formative springtimes when I myself was changing each day, grateful to witness their safe and astonishing transformation into adulthood. I could see they made it, fully formed and ready to live into what they were made to be.
Dip into Your Story Hatchery
1. Think back to an interaction with something in the natural world that awakened a sense of wonder. You may find a flash of a memory. It might seem like nothing more than a single snapshot: for example, you see a tadpole wriggling, or a butterfly cracking open its chrysalis, or a bird flying to its nest with a piece of yarn in its beak. You might assume you recall that instant as nothing more than a Polaroid-memory. Start with that. Write down as much detail as you can recall.
2. Revisit what you wrote two days later and see what else emerges as your tadpole-memory takes shape. You may find that more emerges and you can write a full memory as a short scene or narrative.
3. Add to it and write where it takes you.
4. If you dare, share it with the world through whatever publishing opportunities you have (newsletter, Substack, social media, book, essay).
Every part of this was a treasure, Ann. You showed me your masterful writing skills AND you even helped me see ways to improve my own writing. Thank you.
I was thinking of you last evening and how you said you wrote poetry. I see the poet in you here. I am struck by all the ways you brought images to life as I read this essay, and those tadpoles seen as commas in the algae will stay with me for a long time. I truly enjoyed this narrative that gave me a glimpse of you as a child and the places that formed you as a person, an observer of life, and writer.
I love this so much Ann - such beautiful storytelling, and such a great analogy. But more than that, this is such a great example of how vivid memoir-writing can suddenly take a reader back to a story long forgotten of their own. In this case, your words and detailed description of the tadpoles’ metamorphosis reminded me of the ones I used to keep as a child, and how I would watch their little heads develop and features take shape and how sad I was when they were finally became baby frogs and had hopped away. In fact, when you describe your process of letting go, it almost brought tears to my eyes. Thank you so much for this, both in the teaching, and in the telling.