9/27 I am told I really should tell this story: How I raised, maybe ten years old, frogspawn in my very own terrarium, on the sill of my window. Where I lived, so close to the woods in central Germany, you could do this every year, you’d just have to look in any small lake or puddle or a calm bend of a creek, and there’d be frogspawn everywhere. It was easy to breed it, the tiny black dots in the clear jelly would reliably turn into tadpoles, and then the tadpoles would grow legs. You’d only have to maintain some basic hygiene with the water and feed them the flakes of fish food dad was using in his aquarium. I don’t think this was my first attempt at breeding frogspawn, but this time it was certainly my most sophisticated, and the tiny legs which the tadpoles grew as weird appendages next to their tails had already become clearly visible. It was at this point that I had to go away with my parents for, I think, a weekend. When we got back, the situation had changed rather dramatically. There were fully formed, but tiny, about the size of a small coin, frogs all over my room, stiff, crumpled, dead. Their metamorphosis had to have been boosted, eased, facilitated by my excellent care and feeding, so much so that they outgrew my ability to set my own schedule and to stay home when they needed me, pretty much overnight.