Ode to a Salamander

Were it not for the salamander, today might have felt foreboding. Temperatures so high I could almost see the glaciers melt, Mount Baker like a snow cone in the boiling sun. I could almost hear mourning in the song of the thrushes, smell fire in the firs as their needles yielded to brown. How will the wolverines survive these Hellish hot summers? I worried, their fate, like our own, tied to the future of climate change.

Then there was the salamander, submerged in a shallow pond. She looked like a dragon with her head of feathery plumes, mottled skin one with the pond’s muddy bottom. Her eyes, round and huge: what did they see? Probably not glaciers—though her world was made from their snow.

And those masses of eggs, each a bio-sphere of promise. Many will no doubt be broken. But life finds a way.