Perspective

This morning, over breakfast, my family and I were talking about the Bull snakes that live around our yard and keep the rattle snakes away. Among all of the bull snakes, there is the cutest little baby one that we have seen almost every summer for the last two years. I have had run ins with him often while working out in the yard and these run ins reminded me of a tiny little garter snake that likes to hide under the pool whenever we get it set up. My mom said something about them wanting to be out in the sun and that going somewhere cool and damp seemed weird but I reminded her that garter snakes like to swim.

When we lived in my grandma's house, a little over fifteen years ago, a young garter snake slipped into the pool and couldn't get back out. My dad and I rescued it with one of those little animal head clamps you get at the zoo (coincidentally, it was a snake). While thinking of this past story I expressed my disappointment that my mom had not let me keep the snake. My little sister then piped up and said "Of course she didn't. You and Maddi killed your frogs" (or something to that effect). at which point I had to stop her and say "No...you killed our frogs."

Several years before moving to grandma's for a year, we lived in a house in Thornton, CO. While living there, my mother put us through swimming lessons at a local swimming pool. Just outside the pool building, there was this tiny pond choc full of frogs and tad poles. One day, after our swimming lessons were over, my mom helped Maddi and I catch one tad pole each. We brought them home and kept them in fish bowls. It was neat watching them change little by little. Unfortunately, they weren't as safe as we'd thought they would be in those little bowls.

While Maddi and I were off at school, Kelsey would take our tad poles out of the bowls and put them in her little Minnie Mouse music box. I would get home, see them gone, get them out of the box, and put them back. We kept telling her she couldn't do that but every day I'd come home to an empty fish bowl. Eventually, Maddi's poor tad pole died. I think Kelsey learned her lesson after that because we moved my tad pole into a larger tank in my room where he stayed and managed to grow into the tinniest most adorable frog, undisturbed by Kelsey. My mom had to go help Maddi catch a full grown frog at the same pond after her tad pole died in order to make her feel better. We kept them both in the tank in my room from then on. My frog actually lived for quite a long time and, at one point, managed to eat every last minnow I'd brought home from the lake up at our cabin (curse that frog, how was I supposed to know he'd eat my baby fishies). 

I find it interesting that, in Kelsey's mind, we killed our frogs. Somehow, she was no longer responsible. Granted, she was a very young child at the time, but it just goes to show that memories from your younger years may be, more often than not, incorrect. Her perspective on the event erased her responsibility for the death of Maddi's tad pole but my perspective kept it alive and well. It's just interesting looking back on memories like that. It makes me wonder how accurate my early memories are. Hearing the same situations and stories from different perspectives is always so interesting. In this case, I know that my side was correct (as my mother could remember the tad pole incidents as well), but who knows what memories from my past are a little skewed.