I like frogs and toads. Probably because, growing up in California, we would build elaborate subterranean cities, with tunnels and gunnite-lined toad pits. Like the SIMS but with toads. We'd populate our cities with toads we'd collect from beneath an oleander hedge. And we'd control immigration (but mostly emigration) with a mesh screen lid.
As a writer, it is important to have a window. A good window - that is, a window with a view that inspires -- is a tool of the trade. I'm sure it's tax deductible (especially if it is energy efficient). From my window, as you know, I see cardinals, woodpeckers, jays, squirrels and the occasional hawk. I also see frogs. There are times during the rainy season, where I've seen a "frog fall" -- hundreds of peepers climbing the bricks on the front of my house, diving into my ligustrum, then climbing the wall again, over and over, as the rain falls, peeping and generally kicking up a ruckus. As summer gives way to fall, I have big rubbery tree frogs - beige and gray, but sometimes tiger striped like this guy. They land on my window with a big wet plop at four in the morning, scaring the bejabbers out of me.
I spotted this guy craning his frog neck to watch me from my porch roof, peering from a spot more often populated by squirrels and woodpeckers, but when I went out to take his picture, he hunkered down. I came back inside and began to work, when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him throw himself into the air, arms and legs flailing like a stuntman, landing six feet away, and another six feet down, right outside my window. I grabbed my camera again, and shot this.
The good stuff:
Homecoming week
last night's fire on yesterday's clothes in the hamper
shoe-shopping success
first pizza pie out of the oven
potato chips off the line
factories
road construction equipment lit like lunar landers
photographs and memories
plans coming together
coffee in plastic cups
It lies in my driveway like so much tripe - a Frank Gehry confection of wax and honey as long as my arm. Honeycomb! I stare at it with the consternation of a Taino Indian watching sails manifest from clouds on the horizon. Here it is, October, and all the long summer I'd been out and about, searching my tree canopy for blog-worthy photos: hawk, squirrel, cardinal, jay. I'd seen nary a bee, nor heard anything approaching a buzz. But there is no getting around the fact of this candied asteroid crash-landed in my driveway. Honey, at least a quart, flows from the cracked corpus, treacling down my driveway like blood in a crime scene photo -- a lewd invitation to ants. Mortally wounded bees twitch and fret their last, commending their spirits to the great queen of the heavens, whose light greets them at the end of a hundred tiny tunnels - eternity through a compound eye. Their tiny bees carcasses twitch and curl, giving up the ghost, as others right themselves and perform their preflight damage assessments amid the elm duff, no doubt working out the intricate choreography of culpability and wondering how they'll ever manage to dance their way out of this disaster. They buzz around the wreckage, collecting data, and rise . . . to where?
Reality dawns slowly and my guts turn to water as a fat drip of honey plops, wet and sticky, at my feet. I can't even make myself look up for fear of the Damoclesian horror. The honeycomb in my driveway, I realize, is only a fragment of what must still be hanging in the elm and oak canopy directly above my head -- how far above me? -- and if this piece (at least two pounds) is just a crumb. . .
