It was singing last night - one lonely little frog. It wasn’t a whole chorus like in the springtime but it was chirping away, thrumming its tune.
I thought about it, how it had survived the trepidations of Kybo the cat, the ardent and stealthy hunter, and not only that but its progenitors had survived as well. A remarkable and fortuitous accomplishment.
There was a time when there were no frogs in the fish pond and then they appeared somehow. Still haven’t figured that out. There was a time when there was no fish pond, just a leaky swimming pool full of chemicals. There was a time when there was no swimming pool and no house. There was a time when there was no city, just virgin forest and wildlife running around in profusion.
I thought about it. How we have destroyed so much of the natural world but then replicated it in our landscaping. Here in San Antonio we straightened the sacred river to control flooding, scraped the embankments clear of its natural flora and then made it crooked again, planted native trees and grasses again. Now cormorants and owls and hawks and foxes and tourists cruise the river bank. The rapids and the rocks create habitat for fish and turtles.
In my neighborhood there’s creative landscaping everywhere.
This old cedar elm that was planted along the street when they built this development 50 some years ago.
Wild flowers and decorative grasses grow along the curbsides.
“Silver spire”, the homeowner says to me when he came out to see why his dogs were barking. I says to the homeowner “We’ve destroyed nature but recreated it in our landscaping”. “I’ll grow whatever grows here.” says he to me.
Pollinating plants for the butterflies and the bees are popular.
A wall of shrubbery with an overhanging Pecan tree creates a groovy nook. Although you can’t really see, it’s an entrance to a home.
A community garden, veggies and fruit trees grow here.
We have replanted what we have chopped down.
That’s a hopeful sign is all I’m saying. Maybe we can live with nature.
There are critters all over my yard: squirrels, raccoons, feral cats, a resident pair of cardinals, sparrows, doves, a baby opossum, of course the fish and the frog.
And if we can’t survive alongside nature, then that’s ok too. We may be the last frog in the fish pond one day. We’re not essential to the biosphere, we just think we are. It could be that nature will survive but we won’t.
Reminds me of a poem. It’s called ‘panorama’.
get up in the morning / take a shower
put on some clothes
the agenda of work composed
of so many tiny tasks
and in the end back to bed
the disassemblage / what has been done ??
look how a tree works
it drops its seeds everywhere
if all the human beings disappeared
from New York City in a hundred years
it would look like a forest
the arduous nature of life
paved over
by a canopy of elm oak
birch beech magnolia maple
chestnut pine spruce hawthorn sweet gum flowering dogwood
willow
music from buddha bar 1:08:40
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a frog in the fish pond