Those Were The Days...Frog

In my effort to deal with the plight of many creatures, I had the never-ending task of taking each one I found in distress, cart it home and deal with the problem. I was 10 years old. My heart was tender for God's creatures and I could not, in good conscience, let them die. At the time, it had not occurred to me that God Himself could easily take care of them. I had it on good authority that He had given that task to me. How did I know? No idea. Don't remember that.

Again, my Mother had no idea what I might bring home next. (Please read the story called Those Were The Days...Rabbit) This time it was tadpoles, roughly a hundred of them. It had rained a real gully washer and the creek close to our house had overflowed. After the sun came out, I went exploring with a couple of friends. I noticed that there was a huge puddle that looked extremely active. There in the puddle were a whole lot of tadpoles. They were going to die if I didn't do something. It never crossed my mind to just scoop them up and toss them back into the creek. I have no idea why except that this was exciting and I had never raised tadpoles before.

When I got home, the trusty fishbowl came out one more time. It has quite a history. There had been many previous tenants. With water in place, the many tadpoles were released. The very first thing out of Mom's mouth was.....'YOU have to take care of these. They had BETTER NOT get out of that bowl either.' In my mind that was more or less a "duh moment" since they were swimmers not climbers but Mom was adamant. (She was that a lot around me)

Then came the day that I noticed the tadpoles were acquiring legs! Now that was interesting. But now they could get out of the water and sit on a rock. There needed to be froggy type furniture. Unfortunately, they fast became frogs. LOTS of frogs. Naturally, when a wild thing is in a closed environment, there are numbers of them that die. When all of the mortality ceased, there were twelve little bitty frogs in the bowl. They were about an inch tall. They hopped around all over the place. Now I had a problem. Frogs like to jump. They did. Out of the bowl. Mom was a bit upset. My Mother is a sweet person but when confronted with a number of frogs in very unfrogly places...well, she loses it. I had sympathy for her.

I gathered the guys together back into the bowl. They were happy..I thought. Frogs can't grin, can they? Maybe not, but they had that 'I really love this place' look on their faces. Sort of like a lilypad experience. Yet, frogs do jump. Often. Out of the bowl. After they had escaped several times and I was able to find them all....I think....Mom decided enough was enough. They had to leave!

With a sad heart, I went into the back yard. Slowly, so as not to frighten my charges, I let them go. There was a wave of frogs headed to places unknown yet I could still imagine froggy smiles on each face for having had the opportunity to be loved, if only for a season.

Those Were The Days...Frog

by Lura Langenback