Frog

Before we went away to Istanbul in 2003 we had a pond at the back of the house. It was made of black plastic and not very large, but it was up against the foundation and housed a few goldfish that survived the winter outside, perhaps because I kept the pump going. It also had a couple of flowering water lilies in pots and a layer of mud at the bottom, which was important for another inhabitant of the pond. We put the goldfish in and the water lilies, but the other inhabitant just moved in at some point. It was, of course, a frog, and it delighted me that it had found the pond and stayed. When we returned home from somewhere, I would often check to see if the frog was still there and marvel at its jewel-like eyes in the surface of green duckweed that had also moved in and covered the pond. And it stayed over a couple of winters, presumably hibernating in the mud, but I never did see eggs or tadpoles in the pond, though I certainly watched for them.

When we returned in 2008 the pond was no longer in use, and I had to dig it out that fall because we were putting our main entry door right where it had been. The pond stayed behind the shed until this spring when I dug a large hole near the new deck and installed it again. It now houses four goldfish and one white one with an orange patch and is covered with water lettuce and water hyacinth. A few nights ago when Lorraine went to scoop out some water lettuce because it keeps filling in the pond’s surface, a small shape jumped from the grass into the pond and landed with a quiet splash. It was a frog.

The sight delighted me, just as it had before, and I was really happy that a frog had once again moved into our pond. I don’t know when it arrived, but it may well have been in the last big rainstorm we had, which was in the middle of last week. I remember nights when we were driving home to Maitland years ago that we called “frog nights” because of the frogs we’d see jumping across the road in front of us; maybe we’d had a frog night here and this frog had found its way to our pond.

I saw it this morning perched on the little shelf at the side of the pond. I don’t expect that our big plastic frog sitting on the rock was any kind of decoy, any more so than the little turtle inside the pond, but whatever brought this frog to our pond is a good omen, a sign that something is right.
I have tried to match it with the images of Nova Scotian frogs you can find here, but I can’t say that I’ve identified its kind. Maybe it’s a young one still without adult markings, or maybe I just didn’t notice the right picture. At any rate, it’s a frog in our pond, and it’s one I’ll keep watching and taking pleasure in its shining green presence.