I was sitting out on the front steps, catching up by telephone with a friend from college. Sunset had already faded, and the flower beds formed dark and jagged silhouettes against the dim street and playing fields behind them. Morning glories spent the summer winding their way up our lamp post, and now they filled its lighted glass globe with bright green leaves and purple blossoms that were the only vivid colors left before me. We’d just watered a few late-season plantings in the front beds, and droplets sparkled here and there among them. The city’s old-fashioned street light provided the only other illumination, except in the distance, across the ball fields, where spotlights brought out the sharp outlines of the big junior high’s lovely white tower. Otherwise, it was too dim out there to see any color in the schoolhouse bricks or the fields.
In our yard, few leaves had fallen from the maple tree. In a good year, on a sunny afternoon in October, that maple is one of the ruddy jewels of the neighborhood, but now its leaves and the smaller branches rustled in near-darkness. The air was refreshing, and a bit of breeze occasionally amplified a freight train passing a few blocks away, or a car or two out on the main thoroughfare beyond the school. It’s good for morale to see the white tower shining there — a windstorm toppled the thing several years ago, and I feared that as a community we’d let ourselves be satisfied with a clumsy patch-up job. But no! Within a few months the school’s elegant old tower was as good as new, maybe even a little grander than before. In challenging times like these, we might easily have made do with less, made do with something diminished or even ugly, and later generations would never know how we’d let them down.
In our catch-up phone calls my old friend and I tend to talk for a loosely organized hour about family, and music, and what we’re reading. We have opinions about the dismal state of the world, and sometimes before the call we read the same handful of poems or a short story and we talk about what they mean and how they were constructed. We haven’t seen each other for a good number of years, but we hope to remedy that before too long. If after all the years he says, “You haven’t changed,” that will confirm that he’s still the generous fellow I knew way back when. The latest call was very pleasant, to be sure, renewing friendship, enjoying a sweet evening on the front steps.
Then a little motion caught my eye in the darkness. On the sidewalk, the light breeze nudged a small, dark leaf, making it hop forward an inch or two. And then another nudge from the breeze and another little hop forward, and finally a third. Hop, hop, hop in the darkness, this leaf-sized little hopper was starting to seem like it might not be a leaf at all. I stood up and walked over and leaned down. It was a toad alright, making its way toward the freshly watered part of the flower beds. Maybe it was seeking a drink or maybe some insects stirred up by the action of the sprinkler would serve as an evening snack. Who could tell?
I recall a total of zero toads living in our yard in all the years when we mowed turf grass back and forth from edge to edge of the property. But now all these flower beds and, increasingly, native plants fill the place with insect life and blossoms. I guess we’ve improved our little place enough to attract a resident toad. I studied the critter there on the sidewalk, a dark lump, all bumps and bulges. When I looked away for a moment, the toad was gone.
Music: "Wrong Foot Forward" by Flook
