The Frogs

Awakened by a vigorous round of croaking. Impossible to get back to sleep, so I go out with my mug of coffee and my slab of ethafoam and sit on the ground about fifteen feet away from the puddle. In five minutes I achieved the zen state of invisibility and the chorus resumed. They're so frenetic. Watched for maybe an hour, their courtship is all slide and slither, all splash and plop. Watching frogs mate is a great beginning to any day. Back inside I make a one skillet breakfast of sausage, potatoes and eggs, topped with a sauce from Belize that is so hot it makes my eyes water. Then, to further enhance the glory of the day, not one, but two Piliated Woodpeckers, ruby crested and artful, standing still, vertically on tree-trunks, with their heads cocked, listening for activity beneath the bark, then hammering furiously after a grub. About as much entertainment as I can stand. Plow through the rest of Michael Cabon's "Telegraph Avenue", he's a wonderful writer. A flying squirrel got in the house. I have a system for dealing with this situation. I open the back door and herd the damned around the interior of the house with a tennis racket until it finally finds escape. Morels are only days away. When you begin to smell the fecund leaf-litter is the first clue. Or when you smell the frogs mating. My brain is a labyrinth of smells. There's a woman I've had a few drinks with, the pub has become a common meeting ground for business meetings, upscale enough to drink a glass of wine and decide the fate of some project. She's a union organizer person, very attractive, and bright; and she considers me an expert witness on solitude. We've had several discussions about loneliness; I ask her leading questions, and I am a good listener. She seemed to be casting for a relationship (she won't be long alone) and I told her that I wasn't interested in a relationship, in-so-far as it exceeded meeting for a drink at the pub. Weirdest thing, a kid just showed up at my door, wanting to use my phone, a foster care kid, adopted by the folks in the nearest house down on the main road. Upper Twin. He's maybe twelve. He has a written script he's to read to his adopted father's mother, instructing her to get him some herb as soon as possible, and bring it to the house. The kid looks around, and he sees all these books, asks if he can borrow one, Ian Frazier, "The Great Plains" and I say yes, that he can, take one book at a time from my library, I take the dust jacket off, stash it on a shelf. I don't like being interrupted.