Frogs in a Fix

Hello, I'm Arpy.

I'm the guy on the right or the girl, if that suits you more. Who cares about gender when you're talking frogs?

That's my friend Toadina next to me.

Strangers think we're a mother-daughter pair.

But they don't know frogs, and they don't know our story.

We were in kinda of a fix yesterday when some weird blonde babe disturbed our cover where we'd been attached for the past few days.

She was moving furniture to her herb garden when she discovered us hovering side by side on that Home Depot plastic chair.

She couldn't get over seeing us paralyzed to the plastic and hoping to God she'd just go away and leave us alone.

But no, she had to go get a camera.

"Wait there," she announced to us and went inside. .

I could hear her trotting up the stairs inside the house as fast as she could.

We coulda leaped right off the chair in the time it took her to grab her camera, but we knew better.

There were black-and-white dogs hanging around, so we just hung on for dear life ourselves and played dead like people do when bears start chewing on them.

We were hoping she wouldn't grab hold of one of our legs and take a bite.

She didn't. We heard somewhere that she had taken a liking to aligator meat on her most recent trip to the South.

Anyway, she stood over us, snapped a bunch of pictures and kept "oohing" and "ahhing" over the fact that we'd just remained glued to our spot.

What else were we to do---leap high into the air and land in one of those Border Collie mouths?

I could just see that big dog carrying me around and keeping a tooth lock on one of my legs while the other goofy dog kept a tooth lock on her neck.

We've been watching those dogs since our arrival here in Selle, and they're downright nutso.

So, it was best for us to play like lawn-chair ornaments and let the obnoxious lady take her pictures.

Now, however,  the world is going to see us. Who knows?  Our picture will probably end up on some post office wall cuz we're runaway frogs.

We leaped away from our original home at Mirror Lake. That's a pretty little fishing lake with a lot of lilypads over there south of Sandpoint, and it's prime frog country.

Lately, though, the "turists" have been coming,  and our lives have been in turmoil cuz of all the noise and the foot traffic. 

We knew if we hung around there for the summer, one of us would get stepped on and squashed into the twigs and dirt. Then, the other would be left alone to fend for his/herself.

So, we made a plan and decided to head north for remaining summer months.

We heard about the Long Bridge Swim where all those two-legged bodies jump in the lake and splash their way to the other side.

Don't tell anyone but we each hitched a ride on one of those swimmers and made our way across Lake Pend Oreille early last Saturday morning.

We hopped around downtown for a while, even spent some time at the beach looking at all that art and those crafts. It just amazes me how artists like to recreate frogs in so many ways----pottery, pictures and even wall hangings. I never knew we were so popular.

But that place was crazy, so we went along the beach shore, hopping in between the sunbathing bodies there by Trinity Cafe.

I still call that place the Edgewater, but you know how all those new folks in town are. Most of them are so new they've never heard of the Edgewater or the Beach House.

Anyway, we moved on through what was once bum jungle and hopped our way through some of the Byway construction, spending some time along the shores of Sand Creek. 

That's a good frog hangout, most of the time, but again, it's just too congested with all the traffic and construction.  So, a frog can't get a good night's sleep, let alone catch a tummyful of bugs. 

Long about Monday night we knew we needed to get out of all the craziness of the Sandpoint area and find some place quiet.  

So, we made a plan.

We'd head along the creek shore paralleling HWY 95.  I knew a place with lots of marshy areas where I'd been many years before out Selle way.  So, when we left the creek bottom and crossed over where Selle Road intersects HWY 95.

We went through pastures  where my little friend barely got out of the way in time to avoid being buried by a squirting cow plop.  

We eventually found a woods where there's a bunch of tall grass.  Then, we made our way to the house with all the chairs for a temporary stopover.   We slithered our way in between the two red chairs and figured we could hunker there for several days, maybe doing a some hibernating before moving on to Stan Meserve's pond.

That's a glorious place, by the way, and we planned to spend the rest of the summer there.

But then that crazy lady came and uncovered our hideout.  And, then she took all those pictures.

And, now our complete cover has been blown.  She has posted us on the World Wide Web.

We'll never have any privacy ever again cuz everywhere we hop or plop, someone's gonna recognize us.  Who knows what our fate will be when that happens?

For now, I think our only hope is to part company and head off our separate ways.  

Maybe some day we can meet again and talk about old times.

For now, we're just gonna have to make like a frog and hop on

So it's "Hoppy Trails, Toadina.  'Til we meet again!"