Horned Toads

    MONICA orange

 

 

    It was summer, and when I was a child I would walk barefoot outside of my home in Spencer, Oklahoma—a small, rural, black community only minutes away from modernity and whiteness of the greater Oklahoma City area. At the time my sister and I resided with our great grandmother, and we preferred it that way. These were lazy days that I would spend shoeless on my great-grandmother’s back patio. She had a wooden porch swing, and I would rock back and forth enjoying the shade and the warmth of the sun simultaneously. My great-grandmother, Granny as we would call her, had many mature tomato plants, all perfectly manicured and strong. I believe these were beefsteak tomatoes. She also planted flowers around her front porch—hydrangea and tulips, sometimes the occasional elephant ear would grace the left side of the porch. 
    I remember there were crepe myrtle bushes near the back porch, housed beside a weathered, white basketball goal. Their pink flowers would explode from hard green shells in the spring, and shriveled in the summer heat. Their tissue paper-like petals rained on the thick green grass in the back yard in sudden gusts of hot wind and in the sticky rains of the temperate Oklahoma summer. I liked to walk barefoot back there. There was something therapeutic about placing my flesh against sun warmed stone. Feeling stone and earth grounded me and balanced my energy. My great grandfather paved those sidewalks that connected the cement porch to little pathways beside and behind the house. This happened decades before I was even a thought. These sidewalks seemed to go on and on, leading me to different types of trees and vegetation. My granny had a large pecan tree in the front yard, a pear tree beside the driveway, and a peach tree along the furthest fence in the expansive back yard. I can only imagine how lush and beautiful it all was when my great grandfather was alive. All of these fruit bearing plants set in their ways and various growing cycles, finding purpose in routine. 
    I would let the sunbaked cement and sand smooth the soles of my feet, taking care to miss the occasional loose rock and cracks between the cement squares that housed long weeds adorned with thorns that often looked like miniature black goat heads. This was the summer I discovered horned toads. There were horned toads that lived all over. None larger than a quarter, and so fast you’d miss them if you hesitated. I would chase them and attempt to catch them. At times I was successful, and then saddened when I realized I couldn’t keep them. No jar in hand, yet surrounded by glass in abundance on my street. Fractured bottles bordered where the street and wild grass in the ditch met, and gleamed like diamonds in the afternoon sun.
    Successful in my hunt, yet defeated, I would release them and their spiny bodies would vanish quickly under the cover of unevenly cut grass and weeds of the ditch. I’d take care to miss the broken glass, and chunks of broken black asphalt in potholes on my trek back to my driveway. 
    Nothing lasts forever, not even the tall, beautiful oak tree that heavily shaded the front lawn. Granny in her failing health allowed some drifter to come along a cut away all of its beautiful branches. All that remains in my adulthood is an elongated stump. The tomatoes saw their last season years ago, as granny’s dementia progressed. The crepe myrtle withered away, just like her delicate babies had done season after season, year after year, right before granny’s cataract surgery. 
    Even the horned toads have disappeared. They too were once abundant. The miniature dinosaurs bubbled forth from the thickets of grass and thorns that were entwined with chain link fences. Their fast feet and stubby tails appeared and disappeared as they burst forth from one pool of ragged grass to another on the alternating side of the street in the midday sun.
    They’re all gone.  
    My granny lived a little over 93 years. Hearing of her death reminded me of that peculiar abrasive feeling of the spines and claws of those little horned toads in my small hands. How relief and regret washed over me as their smooth cream-colored bellies slipped from between my fingers. Feeling remorse as I realized I may never hold their little lives in my hands again. Releasing, yet never truly saying goodbye. 
    I wish I had a jar to hold all of her memories that seemed to slip away from her. I wish I could have caught those loose endings to countless sentences that escaped her grasp right before meeting her lips. I wish I could have bottled all of them up for her, to save Granny from the pained expressions of confusion and embarrassment. 
    I wish I could have bottled up the smell of her ripened tomatoes, the sound of black pecan shell husks crackling beneath our feet in the late fall, the syrupy sweet smell of the wild honeysuckle that grew in the front yard. I wish I could have saved them all. I wish I could have saved her, but souls, like little feet and claws, come and go quickly and unapologetically. They too escaped my grip before I could close my hands. And, like nostalgia, like memories, like souls of all shapes, they get free and disappear among the frayed edges of the wild unknown.