Frog Song

            Tonight is the night.

I step outside, barefoot on a lawn soft as grave dirt, to inhale the faintly piquant lemon of magnolias and hear the frog song. A thousand chirring, peeping, cheering voices that hold me enthrall, errands forgotten, while all the summers of my life shuttle past, swift and rolling as the downhill rush of a spring-fed creek.

Copyright Steve Polatnick

            “They’re here,” my mother, daughter, grandmother would say – day gentling into evening, a sky the color of tea roses and violets, and through it all, the song. “Summer’s coming.”

            Oh, summer. The languid air in the valley has a presence that is very nearly tangible, and is at least half made-up of memory. My mother played in this yard as a little girl in the years just following the Great Depression. Hair in a smooth Scout Finch bob, neat patches on her cotton dress, fingers blackberry-stained. The frog song brings the little girl back, and I can see her almost as plainly as I see my own children –

            Here in the same yard, beneath the magnolia, and trailing up the hill after lightning bugs, their shouts jubilant enough to puncture the soul, to suck the heart out.

            I think that the happiest moments in our lives are overlaid with the deepest sorrow, as though we need to experience the depth of one in order to feel the other. Time wounds us, always, simply by its forward motion.

            But anyway.

            Who on earth first applied the word “croak” to that sound? And could it be further from the truth?  

Siblings

The hall window in the house where I grew up is at the top of the stairs, immediately upon reaching the thirteenth step, and to your right. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and it occurs to me that after some thirty years, it could be permanently closed. Stuck in the “lock” position or even painted shut.

            But the mind, the memory, provides the opening.

Copyright Ethan Jack Harrington

 It is the summer of 1974, and I’ll be eleven in October, but for now it is hot enough to suck sweat beads from the nape of your neck before you reach the last step. Ours is an old clapboard farmhouse with no air conditioning, low upstairs ceilings and plain board floors warm beneath bare feet.

            The roof is our haven.

            On a clear August night, my siblings and I are camped there by ten o’clock , eschewing beds for the damp evening air. You can straddle the peak of that roof and ride the prairie like Captain Hook in the crow’s nest, with the darkness spread above and below. Yard lights, far away and isolated, glitter like scattered moon beads and the stars are a glory, but otherwise the blackness is complete, thick and heavy.

            We spread blankets on the porch roof and lie down to inhale the bouquet of ripe field corn and wet earth. Farm kids – our noses fail to register the stink of hog manure, gleaning only the riches from the night. My sisters discuss boys and a future shrouded in the mists of unreality while the transistor radio murmurs assurance that the lion sleeps tonight. My older brother can sing like that, but it is rare that he does, and the little brothers are pests that we chase from our domain until we tire and they prevail. Watergate has scandalized our nation and America ’s youth are bleeding in Vietnam , but the distance to that place is mind-boggling; we are insular, contented in our isolation. And I, the happy middle child - frosting in the Oreo - lay back and watch the stars. Sometimes, if you look long enough, they suck you out of yourself until you are floating, impossibly small and insignificant, among them.

            There was a tranquility in that moment that I haven’t touched since.

            We were closer to God on the porch roof, but we wouldn’t know that until we climbed down and grew up.

I don’t remember the last time I was there. In the way of so many life events, the date passed unmarked, and I found myself with a job, a mortgage, children. It was always my intent to show them our spot, but they had places of their own – creek, sidewalk, front porch swing – and on the rooftop they may have seen only faded and peeling shingles, the magic dried up like dew before the sun.

In the end, it seemed that time belonged to only to those of us who had been there, shared and understood – a link best left to siblings alone.