Frog Memories

Up here in Vermont, we don't see too many reptiles. Turtles live in some of the lakes, but I never discovered one myself - last year I saw one as roadkill, and when I was a child my grandfather brought over a turtle he'd caught to show me. And, as I mentioned in my post about Edgeworth, snakes are even more elusive. I've never seen a wild lizard at all. But amphibians are another matter entirely, and frogs have been part of my summers since early childhood.

My first experience with a wild frog was at a young age, around five or six. I was outside playing when I wandered over to one of my favorite spots, a water-filled ditch on a dirt road by my house. I had a lot of good times at this ditch, and I'll give it its own blog post later, but for now I'll focus on this one incident. I looked into the puddle and saw, peering back at me, the head of a frog. Just the head. With great excitement I ran into the house to tell my mom, eagerly shouting that I had found... a "turtle".

Yes, thanks partly to only seeing the head, partly being startled by something new, and partly being six years old, I thought the frog was a turtle. My mom told me so when she got a look at it, but my enthusiasm was only slightly diminished (turtles were my favorite animals at the time). This was the first of a number of summers that frogs would populate the ditch, although they weren't there every year.

Another, slightly later, memory of frogs comes from after my brother and I stopped using our kiddy pool but before it was thrown out. The pool was filled with outdoor toys and a few inches of rainwater. At the ditch one day I caught a frog, and around the same time I discovered a small brown toad hopping near our houses' back wall. I decided to try keeping the two amphibians in the kiddy pool. While the frog managed to hop out after a day or two, the toad stuck around for at least a week before finally escaping. I remember he wasn't a very good swimmer, but he certainly tried. I also remember taking him and holding him every day when I checked on him. I was always careful to wash my hands afterward, of course, thanks to reading about how some toads secrete poison.

One summer, I came into possession of a small frog and a larger frog. Aside from their size, they were identical. I kept the two of them in a tall bucket and checked in on them every day, occasionally tossing in bugs. They were always sitting in the same positions. One day I was in my room reading when I suddenly realized I hadn't fed the frogs in quite some time. Dashing to the garage, I saw the big frog in his usual pose, but the little frog was gone. I hurriedly released the larger frog into the ditch, solemnly acknowledging the smaller frog's obvious fate.

I still see frogs every so often, and thanks to childhood memories like these, frogs have a way of taking me back to the nineties, when so many of my fondest memories were made as a kid.