As August turned to September, 2015, these little guys started falling out of my rag-mop into my bucket – mop hung out to dry on our deck. We were in drought then, as we often are. Since that September I’ve found them in my damp mop in late summer. This year, they’ve started awfully early, end of May. Here’s a poem from 2015:
Right Now,
I have no frogs in my cake pans – the ones I put out as shallow pools
on my deck, where my wet-mop hangs after swabbing the floor.
Tiny masked frogs hang out in my mop, their ponds gone dry.
Two counties south are burning. So brittle, this cusp of a droughty fall.
Breeze carries oak leaves and pine needles to float on water
in my cake pans, so they resemble pools in the woods, refuge for a frog.
We cherish small water, portion it out for lizards and birds, and now
the frogs.
The thrift-store lady pointed to my 50-cent pans: Baking a cake?
They’re for water, I said. The sweetest taste of all.
~ Taylor Graham
from Uplift (www.coldriverpress.org)
