The Time Capsule | Roy Marshall
A better-than-average week, the one just past. On Monday, wife got the canning bug and by Wednesday evening had ten pints of beef, twenty pints of venison, twenty of pinto (refried) beans, that many of Great Northern (baked) beans and was starting on rhubarb and strawberry jam.
I helped take stuff to the basement, where it was placed on shelves along with jars of pears from ‘09, pork from a Texas wild hog, an old hen, undated green beans, prehistoric tomatoes and so on. The woman has a need, I think, to see those rows of jars and know they’re there, just in case. She would have gotten right to the asparagus, but the lawn needed mowing.
Thursday evening brought an encounter with what may have been an old friend. One of my hydroponic setups is made with PVC in a tiered configuration and, because my grow lights aren’t ideal, works better outside than in. In late April, I put it on the patio next to a reservoir with aquarium pumps that flow water over the roots of 36 lettuce plants. The evening was pleasant. I was making a couple of adjustments, lost in thought, when startled by something that sounded like a Volkswagen horn blasting just inches away.
A tree frog, all-but-impossible to see, had staked out a perch between a couple of heads of Tom Thumb lettuce.
Lime green with bulging red eyes, it seemed identical to the frog that got chummy with my wife last summer. That one, on a spring night when frost was expected, came into the house on her palm plant. He (or she) was quiet as a mouse until about 3 a.m., then rattled the windows with an unearthly sound that had me, in a moment of near-panic, torn between opening fire and barricading the bedroom door.
The little guy stayed with the palm when it was taken out, becoming a regular visitor when wife and I dined on the deck. It often hopped to the table; a couple of times onto her arm or shoulder. Although only about an inch in length, the frog could leap amazing distances. One evening he sprang from a branch to the top of wife’s head, paused, then made a four-foot vault and stuck to a wall.
That leap was 48 times its length. If a six-foot man could jump 48 times his height, his broad jump would be 288 feet; nearly from one goal post to the other. It would be interesting to know if four feet tested the little amphibian’s limits, and how far an athletic one could jump after a few weeks in training.
Wife worries about relationships and was concerned last summer when “her” frog apparently had none. When it disappeared, she hoped there was a honeymoon, perhaps a happy couple making babies down at the pond. Possible, I suppose, and when I saw the lime-green bugger peering out of the lettuce I looked around for another. Two tiers above the red-eyed frog was a spring peeper.
Ah, yes. A spring peeper.
While in fourth grade I captured a tiny, mottled brown frog, put it in a jar and took it to school. The teacher was the dreaded Miss Pine; a stout, grim woman who stalked the aisles with a sturdy ruler, whacking knuckles in anticipation of bad behavior. She saw the frog and melted, almost wept. What had I done? A rare spring peeper, a singing frog, taken from its home and put in a jar? What sort of monster was I? She snatched the jar from my desk and stomped out of the building. She was gone for several minutes, leaving me to dread the sore knuckles sure to come. Instead I spent the evening with Encyclopedia Britannica writing a report about the spring peeper. From that day to this I know one when I see one, which has been about twice.
According to a website, the spring peeper resides in eastern and central Iowa, but in recent years hasn’t been sighted this far west. I don’t want this to hold up the neighbor’s construction, so if anyone asks I’ll say it was something else. But it wasn’t.
Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.