Up until this past week, I’ve tried tenaciously to hold onto that last little bit of summer. But the jig is up.
Last week, the nets at the Worthington middle school tennis courts were taken down, which I suppose is my not-so-subtle hint that the racket season is over. I see that the ducks are flying overhead, destined for the south. It seems like it was only days ago I could spy monarch butterflies sipping on the flowers outside my bay window, but they’re long gone now.
A couple of days ago, I slipped on one of my long-sleeve shirts. I prefer short sleeves, but there’s a chill in the air.
We have had some overnight frosts. We shall have more of them.
Our first overnight frost reminded me of toads. It always does. The reason for this hearkens back to my childhood and summers spent in our little town of Allendorf, Iowa. My mom, dad and I (I am an only child) lived on the western edge of that tiny hamlet, and since I was a nature lover I collected toads all summer long.
I also collected any other wild animal I could catch. I stumbled once on a cottontail rabbit brood, and before the little ones could escape I managed to round up about four of them and held them in a cage on our porch. I fed them what I could, but as my dad explained, they were wild and weren’t meant to live in a cage in a house’s porch. After a couple of them expired, dad convinced me to set the other two free.
I collected mice, too. If I saw a live mouse in a trap, I transferred it to a big jar, and I punched breathing holes in the lid. I remember that in my country school room Mrs. Ransom discovered a mouse in the waste basket by the door. I persuaded her not to kill it or dump it outside. She allowed me to take it home with me — which didn’t even surprise my mother, because by now she’d grown accustomed to my fascination with nature’s creatures.
I had a snapping turtle once. When I could catch baby birds I kept them caged for my pleasure, too. I had salamanders. I had a garter snake one summer, but I left it out in the sun too long and it fried to death.
The toads, however, were special. I kept them in a large washing tub between two cottonwood trees behind our garage. The menagerie grew throughout the summer. By the middle of August, I usually had six to a dozen toads floating in water, or sunning themselves on the big rock that I supplied for them.
Sometimes I’d sit there just to watch them. I’d catch flies, pull off their wings, and watch the toads flick their sticky tongues at them. I invented a game where I’d float Coca-Cola bottle caps on the surface of the water and see which toad sunk the most. Best of all, I and my neighborhood friends raced them on our sidewalk.
I remember one year I had a favorite toad I named Sparky. He was the fastest.
Every year before the end of summer, I made sure to release my toads into the wild before the first overnight frost. One year, I waited one night too long and as I went outside to say hello to my toads they were frozen in a thin layer of ice.
I cracked the ice and carefully placed them all in the grass, hoping they would revive themselves. To this day, I don’t remember how many (if any) of them survived.
That’s why the first frost always reminds me of my childhood. And toads.