for kit's sake

i sat down yesterday morning for some introspection ... a little refocusing ... maybe an attitude adjustment. that's a good thing to do early on a saturday morning, right? after 10 long minutes of staring at the cobwebs on the porch ceiling, i decided i didn't need it. my latest adjustment was a mere four-ish months ago, and it was still working out. my time was better spent sitting on the back porch watching the trees dance in the breeze and the dog chase impossibly fast squirrels.

completely over that spell, i went back inside and ultimately found a frog in my toilet. how did he get there? what did he want from me? i had no idea. what i did know was that harold is a silly name for a frog, so i called him kit and let him stay for what ended up being quite a long time in amphibian years. what did i care? there's another bathroom upstairs.

every couple hours, i checked on kit and he was usually in the same place ... floating with his eyes above the surface ... legs all stretched out. i assured him that he didn't have anything to worry about. he was in a safe place b/c zoey is afraid of linoleum and the bathtub (raise your hand if that surprises you ... yeah, that's what i thought), but he should start to think about going out the way he came in b/c i wasn't running a frog hotel here.

as i woke up this morning, i discovered that i'd fallen asleep on the couch. zoey had dutifully slept as she usually did in her own bed, but wasted next to no time coming over to put her nose on my face since i was so easy to reach. i let her outside and checked on kit. it must have gotten cold in the water overnite b/c he was now all curled up (as much as a frog can curl up) under the rim. by this point, it was way past time for releasing him back to the wild, but the movies i'd watched last nite were somehow more interesting than frogs.

in retrospect, that's just not true. have you seen ladder 49?

now, i don't know if you own a fondue set, but i highly recommend it. the one i have is a year older than me and i've never used the bowl part ... just the forks. usually i use one to fish my contact lens case out of boiling water, which is how i was told to clean the thing ... last week, i used one to poke at something that was on fire under a stove burner ... one time a few months ago i used one for dipping strawberries and marshmallows in a melted chocolate concoction ... today i used the blunt end of one for dislodging a frog from the side of a toilet bowl.

if i was 20 years younger, i would have plucked kit out with my hands and avoided having to wash a fondue fork and tupperware bowl. but i'm old now ... and groggy ... and fearful in the morning.

kit eventually succumbed to my prodding and slid indifferently into the plastic bowl. my pajamas and i marched him to the fence line where it was safe to reintroduce him to the wild: "kit, wild; wild, kit." i didn't want a repeat of the baby bunny incident: "don't even think about it!"

walking back to my house, i felt a pang of homesickness and wished i could somehow transport our old pond to my new backyard. sure, it was a foul looking and smelling bug (and probably disease) hatchery, but i spent summer days on its mucky shores catching frogs for no reason other than to catch frogs. at least i always had something on my feet.

once, my cousin and i filled a bucket with the little suckers and let them loose on the road, but my aunt got pissed and made us put them back.

oh, cut it out ... no harm done. we lived in the middle of nowhere. and i would never even think of doing that to kit.