Frogs and a Wild Boar
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This is an older photograph of the frogs gathered outside of he lanai screen door at night. I hate the metal fish wall hanging but cannot bring myself to take it down and render the family of frogs, who live under there petty much year ’round, homeless. So there it hangs. I’ve counted at least six maybe seven species of frogs on the land. They have tadpoles in the pond, from on the land, and sing many nights outside our door. Leaving the light on for them gives this particular family plenty of insects to eat when they gather around the light.
As exciting as it is to see the tadpoles and the regular army of frogs that leave by the back door, to revel in the birth of new ones also means we must embrace the full lifecycle. Currently, the garage has two frog carcasses. One is from the middle of the summer and I let it sit, waiting until fall, now winter, when it would be a reasonable temperature to clean the garage. I am not sure how that one died; it has been sitting in the middle of the garage where we park one of the cars. The other one is a newer addition, underneath a bag of potting soil. Like everything in Florida, they decay quickly. There is little frog flesh but lots of bone which lasts and must be picked up and discarded into a bush or over the fence. As I said, I do not know how these frogs died. Not dogs, not Vita the cat, and not an accidental human-facilitated death (these happen too often with the cars on evenings when the land is fecund with frogs). Yet there they are in our garage, waiting for me to clean them up. Though that phrase feels wrong, clean them up. It is too late to say bury them, and honestly with so many frogs on the land, I could not bury all the frogs that die. I do not know how to explain it, just to say, the dead frogs have been on my mind today.
On my mind, because up the road a piece there is a dead wild boar. I do not know how it died, but I saw it this morning driving to hot yoga. It is large, at least four hundred or five hundred pounds. It was lying a bit mangled at the side of the road. It is hard to imagine that a car hit it; so large, and no wrecked car near it. People hunt wild boar here in Florida, though not often in our semi-residential neighborhood. All this is to say, I do not know how the boar died, like I do not know how the frogs died. All day though, this palpable presence of death.
The nights are long and dark in December, even in Florida. A chill descends when the sun is down. The dogs sleep soundly. I have not yet heard the owls as we have in winters past nor have I heard the grunts or squeals of a boar. Nearby, cows moo and even howl. We all wait for morning to break. Each sound reminds us we are alive, all of us, together bound by the land, the sky, the sun, the stars. All of us waiting for daybreak, trying to avoid the fate of the two frogs in the garage, the boar up the road, so many friends. All our lives, this palpable presence of death.
