Ha! I crack me up. Coming up with titles for these “Remembering” posts is the hardest part. Anyway…
.
.
It happened again tonight where I was lying in bed just minding my own business when I became totally enthralled with the sounds of nighttime in my neighborhood from out my open bedroom window. Last night it was the trains; tonight it is the crickets/frogs that are keeping me awake remembering things from my childhood up north.
.
.
Growing up in Baudette with a dad who worked for the DNR was really cool. We always got to do neat nature-y stuff that I totally took for granted at the time but now look back upon all full of nostalgia. I remember one spring that the frogs down on the bay beneath my parents’ house were so incredibly loud — we kids were fascinated and Dad had lots of interesting stuff to tell us about the ways frogs live. One weekend morning, he asked us if we wanted to go catch some tadpoles.
.
.
Strangely I don’t remember the actual trip to get the tadpoles at all, but I remember the rest of that spring and summer very well! Suddenly our Fisher Price huge heavy bright red sandbox became a “frog habitat.” Dad had put the right amount of sand piled up like a “beach” on one side of the box, and it gradually sloped down into a little water-filled lake/reservoir with rock islands here and there. And we literally had a hundred tadpoles.
.
.
That was the best summer ever. I remember rushing out to check the tadpoles every morning to see how much they had changed. Eventually they grew tiny little legs and then arms, and then their tails started to shrink until they disappeared. Then we had dozens upon dozens of teeny tiny frogs, which we watched grow bigger and strong enough to jump away. We must have killed a bunch along the way but Dad must have checked the “habitat” to clean out any floaters in the morning before he left for work or something, because that wasn’t the year I learned the hard truth about death. (That was the baby bird year. More on that some other time; it’s not nearly as nice of a story.)
.
.
So tonight I was lying in bed thinking about being glad that I had decided to live in a town that is small enough to allow me to remember those kinds of memories every night before I fall asleep in the summer. I do not miss the sirens and constant “white noise” from the city. Sometimes the freeway annoys me, but the frogs are usually louder so it’s not so bad at night.
.
I just recently became suspicious of the “no dead frogs” memory from that story a couple of weeks ago when Andy and I helped Noah catch some baby toads/frogs. We gave him a ginormous RubberMaid bin (I think it’s funny that it’s bright red like my sandbox was) and I carefully built up a beach and some islands in a couple of inches of water just like Dad had. But all the frogs died after only like a day and Andy and I performed a stealthy late night body-disposing operation before Noah could find them that way. (At least there were only 4 and not 100.)
.
.
Ok, now that that’s out, maybe my brain will let me sleep now. Andy thinks I’m crazy, jumping up out of bed to get these memories written down before I forget them again. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid I’ll have Alzheimer’s Disease when I’m older… (Grandma had it; but that’s yet another story for another day.) Goodnight!
