The Frog Pond

Abstract

The Frog Pond Campbell McGrath (bio) 1 Late July and the grass rises waist-high, leonine,straw and russet running down the little hillside meadowto the frog pond where the night egret lurksbut the frogs are silent now, hiddenin the weeds from the sun and other unmerciful eyes.Across the road the cornfields are lush and delectablethough the milk cows that blanketed the hillsides are long gone,it’s become a corporate business, dairy farming,and the old family pastures have been repossessed by trees.The forest is a voracious, green-leafed glacier.And the frog pond gleamsin sunlight, a mirror the color of oak roots,a slab of rain-wet shale lightly sheathed in moss.Not yet time to swim, but it awaits. After the rain the pond smells like bird seed.Or maybe that’s seed-dust from the feeder on my hands,I’ve refilled it so the blue jay can chase away the cardinalswhile the cheeping songbirds steal whatever spillsor overflows. Bird seed and copper pennies.Soil, minerals, lemon, cedar. Pine Sol cleanser—gray water in the bucket after mopping the cabin floor!Of course, these are all smells from my childhood,so perhaps I am merely remembering the tasteof Poconos lake water and associating it forwards,or back? Nostalgia is time’s double agent.At least it does not smell like Hawaiian Punch. Not yet.The pond is home to a pair of plump golden grass carpand a swarm of little mud-colored minnowsand hosts of gorgeous black-and-violet dragonfliesand vivid, orange-red damselflies. The slenderest damselsraft around on twigs and leaves, one per vessel,and zoom away as I approach them, eye to eye.Sometimes one lands on my head, mistaking mefor what—a lotus blossom? A moose? A golden carp? [End Page 157] Jumping in: sound of water, slap of impact,liquid membrane against my own, skin to skin.The pond is a layer cake, warm as a sun-heated tubat the surface, cool and murky in the middle,while the spring-fed depths remain bone cold,chthonic, unyielding as granite. It starts to rain again.Drops pock the surface and I try to catch them in my mouth.Floating on my back I watch one final cloudcoming over the mountain after the front has galloped past,leaving the crowns of the trees a rough silver-grayin storm-slanted light. Poor little cloud, it is shrinkingaway, smaller and smaller, my sheepish straggler,down to the vanishing point—and gone,atoms dispersed into the atmosphere, unlamented,and unrecorded, I suppose, by any eyes but mine. 2 Before lunch a flock of wild turkeys traipse through the yardlike a posse of tiny dinosaurs, patrolling stealthilythrough the tall grass, head up, head down,gangling, straggle-feathered, dingy but not undignified.A rafter of turkeys, some would have it, rather than a flock,though of course those compound nouns are a crockinvented to delight weakling imaginations,a murder of crows, an exaltation of malarkey—this was a pure-bred American turkey mob,seven or eight gray-scale chicks able to vanish instantlyinto the tawny meadow grass at the slightest sound,like special ops forces on a recon mission.Four or five middling ones, the largest alone out front—is it a harem and only one male, is that how it works?Naughty birds. Pecking and neck-bobbling,obeying their arcane protocols,they traverse the hill and disappear into the woods. “Bird TV,” Elizabeth calls it, watching our airy neighborsfrom the big sliding windows of the sunroom,paired doves, the great blue heron, vultures circling the ridge.Yesterday we noticed three small, eye-catching birdsin the meadow, their wings the bright yellowof October maple leaves, their identity a mysteryuntil one perched carefully atop a bristling purple thistle, [End Page 158] exactly as described in the Audubon Guidefor the American Goldfinch. So there it is. And there they go,swooping to the branches of the mulberry tree,where, some afternoons, the imperturbable woodchucktrundles from his streamside thicket to gobble fallen fruit...