When you spend as long as the red-spotted newt does in a search like this, you grow pickier, more discerning, but are never really salty for long. You measure summers in merry-go-round time, in mental maps of the various walks from your mother’s workplace in Kansas to the temporary motel in Iowa you had to live in for a few months, to your dream home you left in Arizona, imagining walks past cactus, riverbed, across neighbors’ yards, and past chipped park benches in so many states.
