Mud Puddles

A mud puddle is a beautiful thing, as every child knows. It’s good for wading, splashing, bombing through on your bike, or if it’s big and permanent enough, for harboring frog eggs. The puddle a few feet east of our driveway onto 30^th Street was good enough for most purposes, but not big enough for frogs.

By contrast, the puddle next to the Shelton's house on 29^th Street had it all. It was almost a pond.  We could collect frog eggs in a large jar and bring them home to watch them develop into tadpoles, then into miniscule frogs. We had one catastrophe with them—Milly moved the developing frogs, at the  stage of being tadpoles with legs—into an aquarium with guppies.  The guppies ate the frogs.

We covered our shoes with floppy red boots to go wading. We had galoshes for a while, but resisted using them. They were too unstylish, as even a 6- or 7-year-old knew. But in our boots, we would wade into Shelton’s puddle as deep as we dared, watching the water creep up toward the tops of our boots. What we didn’t consider that the top of the boots would flop over from the pressure of the water, and the boots would fill up. “I didn’t mean to!” never prevented Milly from scolding us for having wet shoes.

You would think we would get over it.  But by the time I was in about the 5^th grade, and Sandy three grades lower, we went on a school field trip to Eugene to see a circus, and stopped first at the Eugene Register Guard for a tour.  As we left the newspaper office, we were faced with a large puddle.  We didn’t walk around, we jumped. And the next day, there on the front page of the newspaper,  in front of Mom and everybody, was a picture of Sandy and me. There’s no doubt it was us, in our poodle skirts and rock-and-roll shoes. The photo caught us in mid-air, and there was no way we were going to clear that puddle.  The picture was captioned “Puddle Jumpers.”