Given that I am a person who cannot read horror novels, watch anything even remotely upsetting on television, or even read the news, it is surprising that I am a good person to have around in an emergency. I’m very calm and logical in the face of medical distress; I can’t see blood on TV, true, but it doesn’t bother me in the least in real life.
This is directly opposite to my reaction to anything going even slightly wrong with a vehicle; a warning light in the car makes me burst into tears instantly, for example. Do you think your car is going to blow up if the wiper fluid light comes on? my husband once asked me, puzzled. Maybe?
Generally I think I am great in an emergency – stoic, practical, and logical – but when it comes to situations that are not actual emergencies, I can fall apart. One such situation happened last week, and it involved, of all things, a frog.
As you may or may not know, I basically live in an episode of Lorne Greene’s New Wilderness; there is wildlife all around me at any given time. If only they would peacefully circle around me while I sing a song, I would literally be Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or some other Disney princess with magical animal-whispering powers. I regularly see deer, coyotes, marmots, squirrels, and myriad species of birds; less regularly, but often enough, I see bears, bobcats, and raccoons. There are birds everywhere, all the time: magpies are currently nesting loudly in one of our evergreens, robins and hawks and eagles and turkey buzzards and owls abound, ducks and geese watch Rex and I carefully when we walk in the mornings, and there are huge families of quail scurrying around all the time.
An animal I always forget about because I encounter it so rarely is the frog, but there are frogs living somewhere in the vicinity of our back door. Where or how or why, I have no idea, but last week Rex and I were leaving for our walk; I opened the door for him as I always do before I put my boots on. I turned my back and when I looked there was flat and unmoving on our entryway floor, was a frog.
My initial thought was that it was dead, it was so flat and so motionless. I thought that I had inadvertently killed it; maybe the door opening somehow squashed it flat. How did you get here? I wondered, and that idle thought was followed immediately by Oh my god, Rex is going to eat you. Because Rex, picky eater that he is – he will gingerly take foods that I associate with being special treats beloved by dogs everywhere and then let those foods fall out of his mouth, looking at me with an expression of deep betrayal – is decidedly not picky when it comes to dead animals. He has eaten, and regurgitated, many a dead thing found in our yard, the absolute worst being a deer carcass. You haven’t lived until you’ve cleaned up regurgitated deer fur.
Rex was waiting for me at the bottom of the steps, and so I knew time was not on my side. He was moments away from coming to see why I was so slow to take him for his walk. I either had to immediately clean up the dead frog or suffer the consequences. I couldn’t leave a dead frog in the house, but neither did I want to touch the dead frog. I did what any strong and powerful woman would do – I called for my husband.
It was only seven in the morning; he was awake but not out of bed yet, and he came running downstairs, probably thinking things were dire. They WERE dire. He shooed me out of the house and I drove off with Rex in the back seat, feeling bad for the little dead froggy who, my husband told me later, was not actually dead. After discovering that the frog was alive, he put little Kermit in the vines behind our house, where he hopped off happily. I was relieved I took the hysterical route because I might have had a heart attack, had I tried to move the frog, only to have it rise, Lazarus-like, from the dead.
Weekly Reading
I read a strange amount about death and grief this week. Maybe Kermit was a sign from the universe.
The Widow’s Guide To Dead Bastards. First off, this author lives in Calgary and while it’s weird to say reading a grief memoir was fun, it was actually super fun for me to know all the places she wrote about. Also, there is a recipe at the back of the book for my friend Julie’s sour cherry jam, which was exciting to see (HI JULIE). I would say that half of this memoir is salacious details, and half is an exploration of the grief process and the particular ways this author dealt with the death of her husband. There is a lot about the supernatural, mediums, and communication beyond the grave, which I was not expecting at all, but I’m open to.
When the author’s husband drops dead of heart failure on his way home from Houston, the author discovers a LOT of pretty awful things about him: his extensive porn stash along with his enormous credit card bills paying for escorts and for the affair he was having with his coworker. I can imagine this would be an absolutely horrifying and painful discovery, to go along with the shock of his sudden death at 47. But also, it sounds as though they had kind of a terrible marriage. He did not sound like an ideal husband – threatening to kill her, threatening to die, threatening to leave her. It’s a very upsetting book, and there were some pretty unsavoury details about his personal appearance that were unsettling. How often did we need to be reminded that he was five inches shorter than her, bald, and fat? I guess we all process in different ways and I hope the author has found peace. And also that she makes a lot of money from this book, because those debts sounded grim.
Notes On Your Sudden Disappearance. From the very first page, this book made me resent doing anything that wasn’t reading this book. I was completely obsessed and swept up by it. I promised myself I could read it when I finished things I needed to do, like it was a special treat and reward. It WAS a special treat and reward. This is a perfectly-written book: it’s so beautiful and moving, and yet hilariously funny and witty. It is a gorgeously done meditation on loss and grief, it shows the unraveling of a family after the loss of one of its’ members, it shows the complexity of people, forgiveness, and learning to live with loss. I loved it so very much.
A Life Of One’s Own. This book is part memoir, part essay collection. It draws interesting parallels between the author’s life – her divorce, the loss of her mother, her friendships, her ability to be creative – and that of nine esteemed women writers. I really enjoyed reading how such authors – Mary, George, Zora, Virginia, Simone, Sylvia, Toni, Elena – lived their lives and turned out works of art. If you have to google any of those last names, may I suggest you read their work? Thanks to Gill (HI GILL) for the recommendation!
Tomorrow is April Fool’s Day; I am not at all a person who enjoys tricks or practical jokes, which I think are almost always mean-spirited at best. However, my younger brother and I have had a running joke that has lasted over three decades, one that I am not going to explain but involves a dead horse. Too bad it didn’t have to do with a dead frog, things could have gotten interesting this year. In any case, several months ago I sent him this photo on my walk:
To which he responded whoa, is that actually a dead horse? It’s not, it’s a sleeping horse. I hope you all have a wonderful, non-foolish start to April – my birthday month! xo
