In the living room brother kept trout. They swam in a kid’s inflatable wadding pool that looked like a giant nest on his shag rug.  He was never successful at raising trout indoors.  Perhaps they were too wild to live in the house and of course there’s the fact that they are jumping fish.  If Don wasn’t home to pick them out of the rug, brush off the fuzz and plop them back into water, they dried out in the carpet and died.

Don kept his fish on the living room floor. I keep my fish in at the living room window in a tube.  The clear plastic tube is filled with water and each of its ends are sunk deep into one of two cookie jars filled with water.

Guppies are smart and curious enough to find their way back and forth and I can sometimes see them thinking.  Two or three of them press their noses to the glass and peer at the other jar wanting to be there. Then off they go up through the tube.  On sunny days all the guppies line up, side by side, in the top arch facing the window.  Are they watching people walk by or birds flying in and out of the outside kiwi?

I dream of hanging fish tubes from my ceiling all the way to the kitchen.  I think the guppies would enjoy watching John wash dishes, the cats romping after each other through the house or watching from in water programs on T.V..  nancymauerman.com

Tube Fish