My older brother is, and was, a solemn type of guy, unable, or unwilling, to get uniquely excited about anything. This is why in, or around, 1988 I told him that a northern pike ate a frog near the pier at our summer vacation spot in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. It didn’t happen, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted him to be excited about something, and so I lied. There weren’t many frogs in Williams Bay in those days, or at least not near our home, so frogs in those northwoods were part of our summer experience. The issue was my older brother, having heard the news about the frog being eaten by a large fish, decided to catch a frog and thread a hook through it. He cast it out beyond the pier and waited. I was on the shore, nervous and guilty. He never caught a fish and even though I carefully unhooked the frog and let it “swim” away, I knew then that I had killed that frog. The grief was overwhelming, and I spent the rest of my life intentionally avoiding the murdering of any more frogs, which isn’t as easy as you might think.
My property has a large lawn, and in an attempt to simultaneously force myself to excercise, retain some humility, and continue a tradition that has found me mowing lawns every summer week of what is at this point the vast majority of my life, I mow that lawn myself. My walk-behind lawn mower forces the exercise, and even though my grotesque and nearly crippling phone checking habit continues throughout the mowing, I enjoy a little bit of mental down-time while I stripe that lawn back and forth. The issue is my lawn is overrun with small frogs, and the combination of thick grass, lots of frogs, and 50″ of whirling blades has forced my affection for frogs and my pledge to not harm them very much into the fore.
When I first discovered these lawn frogs, I would make a concerted effort to avoid them with the mower. I would see one hopping and would then stop the mower and usher that frog to the safety of the adjacent woods. After some time of this, it became an arduous task, as the lawn is large and time consuming even before accounting for stopping constantly to allow the small frogs to find safety. And so last night I did the previously unthinkable. I just mowed. I paused to let the frogs that I could see flee my blades, but I didn’t make any unique effort to avoid the rest. I just mowed and mowed, back and forth, my mind saddened by thoughts of the innocent amphibians that I was methodically murdering. Worst yet, my blind, bald, deaf, diabetic dog likes to chew on grass clumps left behind by my mower and it only now dawned on me that the real reason she eats the grass is because there are ground up frogs in it, which adds to the horror of this entire situation. I look forward now to fall and to winter, when I get to forget about the frogs for a while, and I’m sure the survivors look forward to this seasonal reprieve as well.