The Witch and the Frog

My mother always told me that she was a witch and that when I was a very small boy she'd turned me into a frog and that I had hopped around the yard behind her while she watered the plants. I could remember that, or almost, you know? I believed her, my mother.  And who wouldn't want to be a frog?  Who wouldn't want to be the one child that she had transformed in this way.  And, she'd always turned me back into her dear boy.

And our whole lives together, we never questioned these truths. We never broke the bond of the shared story. All our lives.

So, whatever I may think rationally, I never read transformation stories the way a person who hasn't been a frog--my mother said, right?--reads that story. (I mean, I probably don't even think about frogs the same way someone who hasn't been a frog thinks about frogs.)

And that's a gift she gave me, a gift we shared together: the magic of story, of imagination, of transformation and sharing.