When Teri and Cindy were little, we lived in the city, but we had many different kinds of pets as we all loved animals. My husband was a football coach at a local high school, and his ball players all knew I loved animals. So one day, some of them appeared at our door with two box turtles they had swiped from our local zoo. I was thrilled and immediately brought into the house the girls’ little plastic pool and set it on our living room floor. Teri and Cindy would just have to make do with the garden hose from now on. I didn’t put any water in the pool as box turtles don’t live in water. When we had company, we would all gather around the pool and watch to see if the turtles would do something . . . anything! As I remember, we didn’t have much company.

One day I found an egg in their pool! I was extremely excited as I had no idea the turtles had ever had sex, and if they had, why couldn’t I have been there? I didn’t even know what sex they were – how do you tell with a turtle? Or maybe just any turtle can lay an egg. I called the director of our city zoo who was very knowledgeable. He told me to put the egg in a cup on soft paper and cover it with moist paper . . . or maybe it was to put the egg on moist paper with a cup over it and soft paper on top of the cup. I was so excited I couldn’t remember a thing he said, but the egg did end up in a cup with some paper on top of it. The egg sat there for days, weeks, months – it went on and on until one day I realized it just wasn’t meant to be. So the egg was out and we moved on to other things.

Those same football players also brought me a big bullfrog tadpole for one of the three fishponds my husband had built for me. I was thrilled again and watched him as he grew into a giant frog. I named him Freddy. He would get out at night and go hunting but always come back. Sometimes a neighbor kid would find him and come knocking on our door, holding the giant frog in his hands with the frog’s big legs dangling through his fingers. But one winter he froze, and when he floated to the surface of the pond the next spring, he was like a bowl of jelly. So I made another call to my friend at the zoo who told me there was no hope for Freddy. If Freddy looked like jelly, he was jelly.

I seem to have had some sad endings with pets, but they brought me a lot of joy in the time I had with them. I guess that’s just the way life works.