It’s been brutally hot and humid for over a week now. The heat index is usually at least 105 if not 110 or more degrees and there have been “excessive heat warnings” every day. The safest thing to do is of course to stay inside where the a/c takes care of heat and humidity, and where a dry 75 degrees feels absolutely heavenly. However, that doesn’t get the lawn mowed nor weeded – I hand-weed the crabgrass, hauling armfuls of it to the compost every time I’m out there.
Mark was gone all of last week, conference in Denver, and while I could have mowed I didn’t, so last night, Sunday, we went outside, I to weed, he to mow. At one point I walked from the driveway into the garage, or was about to, when I saw what looked like a wad of whitish gum by the garage door, just inside the garage. Now neither Mark nor I chew gum, so I took a closer look and immediately got sick to my stomach: that wad of whitish gum was a belly-up little froggie. I am not normally squeamish but there’s one thing that’ll turn my stomach and that’s squished creatures. I keep telling people that one of these days I’ll break an ankle from attempting to – and failing to – sidestep a bug on the ground. It’s a reflex, I simply cannot – my body won’t allow me to – step on bugs. Spiders. Anything alive. Or dead.
So, I swirled around and meekly said, “Mark?” and then asked him to take care of the poor little creature. Now Mark doesn’t like dead things any more than I do, but he’s a hero, so he got the shovel, and a hand trovel, and scooped the dead frog up. And exclaimed, “He’s not dead! Look!” The little froggie had righted himself once on the shovel and was ready to hop off onto the cool grass. Whether the concrete had been so hot that the poor little thing passed out and went belly up or something else we won’t know. I am just glad that the whitish wad of gum turned belly-up froggie turned out to be a quite alive frog after all. Thank God.
