Jeepers Creepers

It is winter. Serious winter, though in a temperate area like ours it's hard to tell sometimes. You can be walking up by the Belltower, say, and notice a lone rhododendron in full bloom at the edge of the asphalt parking area on the bluff. Wouldn't you think icy winds off the bay would prevent that? Apparently not. Or driving home from Safeway you might see a big pink rosebush in bloom on Landes Avenue. Some days it's warm, most certainly. Unseasonably warm, it would seem. And then the wind picks up or the temperature drops to around or just below freezing and there's frost and even ice here and there. On a night like that in November, I think it was, I came home late and when I opened the front door a little peeper frog hopped into the house alongside me. I scooped said peeper up and put him back outside. After changing into my robe I came back to the foyer only to see the peeper, head high on the door glass, his gluey hands like suction cups holding him up. I couldn't stand it. Much as I'd worried about the Anna's hummingbirds surviving the freezing temperatures, I felt sure this tiny fellow was begging for his life. I opened the door, pulled him off the glass and deposited him in one of the plants in my garden window. Then,as I lay in bed falling asleep, I got to worrying about the cats. What if one of them found him and ate him? So, in the morning I went to the kitchen to find him and there he was in the dish-drainer. I captured him quickly and put him on a plant on the back deck and just hoped he'd make it.

Fast forward to today, January 8th. I took Shadow walking early this morning and we'd just gotten two houses down the street when it became clear that the huge froggy voices we were hearing were in stereo. There was at least one in the shrubbery on our left, and at least one other in the shrubbery directly across the street from that and they were clearly conversing. I really had to smile. Small as these amphibians are they have exceedingly robust voices! Then as we finished the looping path behind the middle school we came upon another pair, again, on either side of the pathway, ensconced in the blackberry bushes, calling back and forth. Naturally I have no idea what their voices are accomplishing - I hear them but do not understand them. It made me think of Henry Beston who wrote in The Outermost House that:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.