I was sitting in this same chair late the other night. I’m always in this chair (God bless laptops).
Looking down at some small movement on the rug, I saw what I thought was a cricket slowly walk out of sight around the cofffee table. Maybe I should get up and kill it, I thought. Crickets chew on things, don’t they? — or else hide in corners and make a racket. I wouldn’t want to have to get up out of bed and find the bastard like I’ve done more than once in my life. But I didn’t want to get up then, either, so I let him go.
A few minutes later the “cricket” came back, inching toward me rather recklessly, I thought, because he wasn’t giving me a choice. This time I did get up, walked to the kitchen where I tore off a small piece of paper towel to keep the bug-goo off my fingers while I crushed the bugger, and came back to my chair. When I bent down to do the deed, I gasped: in the dim, shadowy light between the coffee table and the sofa crawled not a cricket but a FROG! A tree frog, of course, slightly longer than my thumbnail. A beautiful light tan color with dark brown eyes, he let me pick him up without a struggle.
While not as physically entertaining as the flying squirrel trapped inside our basement back in Maryland, the little frog was much more god-like and miraculous: there had to be such creatures here, though I’d never seen one. Back East, sure, especially after a heavy thunderstorm that knocked them from their leafy perches, but not in a semi-arid region above 7,000 feet.
I set him down outside among the leaves inside the planter barrel just outside the door. it was raining intermittently, spitting just a little. Maybe he’ll be okay there for the night, I reassured myself, disappointed that I had to break off the relationship.
A frog, man. No bigger than a lima bean, right here in front of me, in my own house. An adobe house in New Mexico. Is this coming through?
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Maybe they eat crickets? Maybe you just stole his dinner!
No way could this thing eat a cricket. More the other way around.
Oh wait, you thought that… Bad writing! I just fixed it so you can see there never really was a cricket.
a tiny frog! how marvellous!
i envy you, john farr, i’m jealous, and that’s the largest compliment i can make to a fellow artist. i read your blog just to get me a little peace of mind, or was it peas? even if it where peas, imagine, a row of emerald green pearls against a granite surface! which would one want to have? the bright green pearls, or the grey surface?
from switzerland much greetings!
Jealous? PEACE OF MIND??? Wow. Vielen Dank, man.
I think you’re right, though, it must be “peas” instead. I like the juxtaposition with the granite.
John,
Here we have tree frogs, peepers some call them. They make quite a racket in the spring, drowning out the crickets with their caterwauling. I often find them attached to the screen door. They have suction cups at the end of each little finger, and as such they stick to anything, sort of like those gel frogs you can buy in the novelty shops, that stick to the wall when you throw them. Not that I’ve ever thrown a tree frog. Seems cruel.
The weird part of my tree frog experience that when I lived twenty minutes south of here I never saw one. Not in the many years I was there. While here, they’re all over. Maybe if you’re a tree frog it’s not such a small world after all.
Cheers,
~Fred