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Published on 03/23/1998 All articles from this issue

When hillsides sing of spring

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By Mary Cristy

A View from the Hills

The frogs are back. Restored by the long wet winter that was otherwise so damaging, they sing all night under our bedroom window - a welcome serenade, since frogs, like other forms of wild life, once so abundant in the hills, seem few and far between now. And their once mighty chorus has dwindled both in strength and frequency.

Some might think it odd to miss something as mundane as a frog. But, in our family, frogs have always seemed synonymous with crystal springs, or rivers running free, and lily pads, and leprechauns. Like the devas in Findhorn Gardens in far-off Scotland, our frogs seemed touched with magical powers, and their singing was a hymn to the stars and the gods of the forest, though our forest consists only of some Monterey pines, a few heritage oaks, and the redwood tree we planted in memory of Grandpa Nicolas when he died long years ago.

When our sons lived at home, and they and their friends had treehouse picnics and sleepovers, the frogs were prolific, as were the foxes, the raccoons and 'possums. We slept with the doors unlocked and saw the stars through undraped windows. The frogs sang us to sleep, or, if we wakened in the night and felt an unreasoning twinge of fear for the future and what it might hold, their steady chorus soothed us. And we snuggled back into the covers, knowing God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. The night music was a psalm, and our hills reverberated with it.

When two of our sons left for Vietnam, leaving our third little Indian to sing "Where have all the young men gone?," we wrote to remind them the frogs were singing too, "for luck," we told them. Because we needed to believe that some things never change.

To put your faith in the song of a frog is, after all, no more strange than making a wish on a star, or throwing salt over your left shoulder to deflect the curse of having spilled it. Humans are funny, intuitive, hopeful, optimistic, despairing, desperate creatures, by turns. And we pin our hopes on the gossamer wings of a dragonfly, and seek the answer to whether our love is requited in the fragile petals of a daisy.

So when Cris wakes in the night to nudge me and whisper,"Do you hear the frogs?" I listen - and it doesn't take Merrill Lynch to tell me something important is going on. And, that whatever our three kids are up to at that moment, they're "receiving" our mind-to-mind transmission: "The frogs are back."

And, like the Oxalis that spills its brilliant yellow light all over the green hillside behind our studios and makes us want to run, shouting, through the fields, the frog-song lifts our spirits as we celebrate the long winter's demise and welcome, with grateful hearts and uplifted arms, the coming of spring.