Finally, taking the hint from the lonely pieces scattered about Arlington, I stooped to pick it up. I looked at it's nearly-blank face and wondered about the greater picture it once fit... smirking at the sappy, timeless metaphors abounding:
How we're given but one small piece at a time, and never the greater picture to which it belongs. No box, no neat pile of border pieces, no friends to complete sections for us. We find the pieces on the street. In the gutters, in the mail, in our own genetics. At school and at work. They fall from trees as we sit alone and stick in the wheels of our grocery carts. We examine them with rarely any scrutiny and, if they aesthetically please us or seem likely to fit the piles/sections we have already pieced together... we keep them. If not, we toss them back from whence they came. This must be meant for someone else. But we never know, really. Perhaps it was our own corner piece we just threw back. We'll never know.
I placed the ragged piece on my bed side table and looked at a piece of artwork in progress- a piece framed and littered by puzzle pieces drawn in archival ink. I thought about the many different versions of the piece, the pieces that exist on paper and the ones only in my head.
Pictures and stories enter my mind; the things that make up "me."
It drifts to the summers of my childhood, a farm on County Road 14. Every summer when the irrigation ditches would fill, carrying water to the farms down the road, water would drain into a small mud-lined pond in the pasture to the left of our log home. And every summer, they would appear as if by magic.
We wondered if the adult salamanders burrowed into the mud, surviving year-round, awaiting their brief chance to emerge and propagate... it seemed unlikely they had traveled from any distance, and the rain fell far too sparsely on the desert plains to provide them this opportunity. I sat and watched them studiously, never identifying a species despite my staunch examination of Audubon guides and library books. I caught them and looked at their feather-like green gills. They appeared as instantly as the water. Hundreds, maybe thousands of tadpole-like babies wiggling happily about. I made it my quest to catch an adult, though the task was nearly impossible. Whenever I would spot one on the bottom and wade into the small pool with my dad's too-large rubber waders, the mud stirred, obscuring my vision and giving the black parents ample time to vanish. I would visit them daily.
As summer drew to a close, the irrigation ditches stopped running. Within the week the pond would be gone and the small space between the ditch and make-shift dam would return to dry, cracked, lifeless earth.
The babies, whose still-tiny bodies had doubled in size, watched their world rapidly shrinking. Each day I visited with growing anxiety as the small pond became smaller, smaller, and smaller still. Each year I attempted to gauge the rate at which the water was disappearing, so that I might be there at just the right moment.
When lucky, I arrived just as the pool became the size of a large puddle. I filled one of my father's 5-gallon buckets halfway with water from the spigot, and rushed with some difficulty across the pasture. The ample number of children had surpassed the puddle in mass. The pond had become a small, writhing, gasping dark mass of amphibian childhood. I carefully, quickly scooped them up with a cup and poured as many into the bucket as my small arms could lift. The adults were long gone, leaving their progeny to fend off beaked attackers and the nearby noon-time sun.
One year, in response to my hysterical pleading, my father placed the bucket on the back of his flatbed truck and drove across the street so that I might pour the children into the swampy river. I knew their chances were slim as I watched the fishing loons and herons, and felt the vastly colder temperature of the moving water... but my hopes were high. They stood a far better chance here than baking in the sun atop the hill.
Every year the sight of their tiny, urgently flopping dark bodies burned into my psyche. Each year I mourned and hoped for better results next summer.
But even at age 6 I understood the terribly reliable manner of these things.
What's the point of this story? None.
It's just one piece of my puzzle.
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