FIRST FROG

Heard first frog on Saturday night, singing from the paddy; what a welcome sound, after so long of only the silence of snow and the whispers and howls of air being spun into wind, with sometimes the silence nailed to a tree by the screech of a crow; out of the mud, out of the darkness, how that single tiny resurrected life gave life to the night, that slow and simple and rhythmic song evoking in me a strong echo of the feeling my long-ago forebears must have felt when at least once more the god of winter had released the sun, granting one more summer to the land. How in our true and forgotten souls we long for the full depths of that ancient, natural gratitude! Not to what we think we know, or to what we've been taught to believe, but to what we are!