Childish Notions

How does it happen, that yesterday I write a story about a little bright green tree frog, about reverent communion between a man and nature, and the first thing this morning a little bright green tree frog is found in my sink hiding behind the dish washing thingy?

We’ve all had it happen, that we think about someone and our cell phone rings, and the caller ID shows it’s an incoming from the very person who was just in our mind. Weird. But this visit from a tree frog, to me, is a whole other category of weird.

Don’t get me wrong–I love it. It sort of takes me back to the third grade when I believed I had, like, a Vulcan mind-meld with the animals on my grandfather’s farm. The same grandfather who had an agreement with wasps and bees, and who was the inspiration for the story I wrote. The same grandfather whose cows and horses would fall into line behind him when he walked across the pasture. This man did not tell me that creatures could hear and understand the words I spoke. He’d never say something silly like that. It more or less rubbed off him and onto me to believe such a thing. For a while.

But then I grew up. And those childish notions vanished from my imagination.

Joe Formichella, next door here at Waterhole Branch, has watched the close interaction with us from the three juvenile Red-shouldered hawks born in the live oak above Resurrection stage. “You know,”  Joe said to me, “whatever doubts I might have once clung to about [my tongue-in-cheek suggestion of] millennial, coffee-drinking hawks and such, I now have to relinquish, at least rethink.”  (Joe knows about the sparrow that landed on my head last summer.)

Then he added, “These twilight years on the Branch get better and better…”

Maybe the sparrows and hawks and the little green tree frogs want us both to believe there is also a door swinging open, a way back for us two old guys to the mysteries and possibilities of our youth.