Frogs and Memories

It is also a reminder of a funny childhood memory. When I was little girl, three or four years of age, my family lived in Florida. Stretched alongside our small cinder-block home was a wide drainage ditch, a perfect habitat for peeper frogs. We called them rain frogs, because the little critters showed up with every rain. Some people call them chorus frogs because of the racket they make after a rain storm.

My older brother and I would search the little critters out and put them into any handy container. Their little feet have suction pads on them that allows them to stick to leaves and branches, or the side of a glass jar, or your arm, which feels quite creepy. This particular time the nearest thing handy to hold the tiny frogs was a pair of toy binoculars we had been playing with. As I recall, I watched my towheaded brother pull the eye piece off the binoculars and drop the tiny frogs into the empty cavity, first one side and then the other, snapping the eye pieces back in place like corks. I joined him in the endeavor, and when he went off to play, I continued to happily gather little frogs, which I adored. At some point I carried the pair of binoculars holding my treasures inside the house, sat the binoculars carefully straight up on the floor, and went off to play elsewhere.

The next day, I was playing in the bedroom when I heard my mother let out a scream. I ran into the living room to see my mother balancing precariously atop my child’s wooden chair. The memory of her is etched in my mind, my pretty mother resembling one of the retro pinup girls, her bare legs very long beneath cuffed short-shorts, while she gazed down from her perch in horror at a horde of little green rain frogs jumping in all directions. The binoculars lay on their side, the eye pieces knocked off.

I don’t recall getting into trouble over the incident. I do faintly recall doing my best to capture the little critters, and promising my mother to never, ever again put frogs, or anything else, into the binoculars. In later years, whenever I mentioned the incident to my mother, she would smile. As I do now when I hear the chorus of peeping.

I’ve toyed for years with the idea of writing family stories for my grandchildren and those who come after me. But then I argue myself out of it. I doubt my grandchildren would be interested, nor anyone far down the line. Who is to care? Yet just now with the memory of those little frogs, I realize that maybe the telling is for me to remember. Writing the memories brings clarity. The pleasant ones warm the heart, and the unpleasant ones remind of the courage gained in getting through.

Blessings for remembering the good,

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Lost Highways

The beginning of the Valentine Series

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Meet Rainey Valentine: thirty-five, twice divorced, a woman with broken dreams but irrepressible hope. When her mother dies she inherits a truck, an old barrel-racing mare, and a lifetime supply of Mary Kay cosmetics. Rainey packs it all up and heads off, leaving Valentine, Oklahoma in her rear-view mirror. Then, somewhere outside Abilene, she finds him . . . a man as lost as she is.