put algae in bowl. put a littel of grass.

She collects things. Anything, really, that appears to have value or might possibly one day have value or used to have value a long time ago. Especially Natural Things. Things from Outside.

Case study: the tadpole that is gaining life in an old salsa jar on my kitchen counter. She brought it home from school last week in a Dixie cup. It was still an egg at the time, but she promised me with honest eyes that the small round darkness in the murky water drifting near the bottom of the cup was Most Definitely and Absolutely a Frog's Egg, and that it would Hatch and that it would be a Tadpole and that someday it would be a Frog.

And sure enough, in two days it was indeed a small straight darkness, motionless at the bottom of the salsa jar, and I was Certain it was Dead.

It was not, and it has now very nearly tripled in size and is, as I said, gaining life on my kitchen counter, exhibiting all the proper signs of being a tadpole.

Like I said, she collects things.

So one day last week I decided that we needed to clean out her backpack. It was Entirely Too Heavy for a second grader who totes only two slender homework folders to and from school every day. Two folders, but it easily weighed several pounds. It was time to investigate, and here were the contents:

four books of various weights and thicknesses all belonging to the school and needing to be Returned;

a bottle of Gatorade seven-eighths drunk-- left over from an after-school event in February;

a bit of stick, maybe ten inches long, skinny, with all the bark peeled away ("That's my magic wand," she said);

the remnants of a bag of pretzels, ie., the bag, virtually empty, and Lots and Lots of pretzel crumbs and dust which was coating

several pencils and pens, also of various weights and thicknesses;

folded and crushed sheets of paper, on whose various notices the information was Seriously Out of Date;

a dime. a penny which was coated, on one side, with some sort of waxen substance. Red. Maybe it was gum;

a bookmark she had knitted of green yarn;

a Christmas ornament she had made from a paper clip that had been turned into an angel;

a large, green, plastic, four-holed button on a string that she has turned into some kind of spinning game;

a painted wooden butterfly threaded through with yellow string;

a crushed baggie of what once must have been crackers (different pocket from the pretzels);

four fist-sized (adult fist-sized) rocks.

I vacuumed out the various pockets in the bookbag. I kept the button string game, the butterfly, the knitted bookmark, the angel ornament. I threw away the papers, the baggie, the pretzel bag; I recycled the Gatorade bottle. I wiped off the pens and pencils and put them in a small pocket of her backpack; I removed the dime and the gum-covered penny to Another Place. I neatly stacked the books and returned them to the bag and admonished her to Please Return These To Their Proper Places Tomorrow, and I asked her to Please Take These Rocks Outside.



I put the magic wand back in the bookbag.