The Time My Mother Killed a Toad
It forever impacted me
One of the few things my mother and I had in common was a love for gardening. Her father also had a love for gardening. I have wondered if green thumbs were somehow genetic but then again none of my three siblings ever developed green thumbs. It was just me.
But while both my mother’s thumbs and mine were greenish, there came to be some humongous differences.
As a kid while the family was living in the beautiful Great Southwest Desert I was my mother’s little helper in her large garden. During the course of my childhood I pulled approximately 8.6 billion weeds. All of my fingers turned green. I also earned a few coins moving the grass twice a week in the summers.
When my mother was not looking I would sneak out to the garden to graze, plopping grapes and strawberries and apricots and peaches and anything that was ripe into my mouth like some starving child from some third world country.
I also did a lot of sniffing. My mother had eighteen rose bushes on the property, each a different color. I was constantly sniffing roses as well as the two extremely fragrant butterfly bushes. While my hands were green my nose was a constantly changing rainbow of different colors.
