I Killed a Frog

Spring doesn’t normally conjure up images of dead frogs, but, for me this year, it does.  We bought a house last summer, and the yard (I’m tempted to call it a garden after having finished Michael Pollan’s Second Nature) is beautiful but quite overgrown.  We’ve recently been working on the four raised beds/islands that will soon be our herb and cut-flower gardens.  They had a variety of bulbs, roses, and other plants in them, but, in order to use them as we wanted, we had to break them up and get out the weeds.  This meant a lot of work with the hoe (and the hoe-like tool that has tines).  The result:  I killed two frogs.  One I severely injured and sliced open his jaw.  The other, well, I just can’t say much other than I accidentally murdered him.  He ended up impaled on one of the tines of my hoe-like tool.  It was quite sad for me.  I don’t know how he ended up three to four inches below ground level (hibernation, perhaps?), but I definitely found him there and accidentally killed him.

Eyes closed, hands folded, I think he's religious.

You should click on the picture, to get the full effect–it isn’t gruesome, just looks like he is perched (in prayer?) on the tool.  The experience was like Braveheart (i.e., guts spilling out) but, instead of Mel Gibson yelling “freedom!,” this frog just occassionally opened his eyes if I squeezed too hard when trying to remove him from the tine.  All in all, it was really quite emotional for us both.

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