I haven't
heard you much this year. Your
post-rain summer evening call, always so other-wordly, like a sound effect from
a 1960's era Sci-Fi television series, has been silenced by drought. Instead you've appeared to me twice,
taken shape in some unlikely place like an apparition, as if frogs had souls
and yours was restless.
The first
time, I opened the newspaper box from the back and there you sat like a stone,
gray skin granular and crystalline, waiting for news of rain.
Last night,
I filled the watering can and emptied it on the petunia, its pink, bugle-shaped
blooms spreading from the pot en masse, like a phonograph's horn, emitting
nothing, but trying to swallow the whole sun. I returned to the spigot to fill it again, to water the
marigolds and the fern, and when the water hit the bottom of the can you
appeared at the top, from the inside.
You had survived the recent flood, a torrent of water that didn't kill
you but must have made you think twice about nature's intentions, wavering as she
does between neglect and passion.
I picked you up and you leapt onto my shirt, revealing splashes of
bright yellow behind the knees on your outstretched legs. You were no longer a specter, the
extra-terrestrial voice of Earth's humid, mid-summer nights. You were real. Eastern Gray Treefrog. Your toepads clung to my shirt and you
climbed right up to my sternum, settling in. I could feel the weight of you there, though ridiculously
light, like the weight of a human infant.
