Yesterday. Rene’ scurried about the place cleaning bathrooms. I was busy manning our new Dyson Animal. With four dogs (only two of which frequent the inside of our home) and a wife who’s allergic to most everything, buying the Animal a few months’ back as a replacement for our tired Hoover was a good move. Anyway, it was clean the house day and my wife and I have divided that chore pretty much the same way ever since she returned to full time work about fifteen years ago. I do the vacuuming, the dusting, and mopping. She does the laundry and the bathrooms. Even the boys’ bathroom in the basement. Brave woman. I should have been out cutting the grass on my John Deere Sabre but the thing is on the fritz again (maybe time to invest in an up grade) so after push mowing the front lawn and trimming around the gardens and the house, I went back to cleaning.
As anyone who was awake yesterday knows, it was ungodly hot and humid as a rain forest; two conditions that make for considerable sweat when working. By the time I finished up my janitorial duties, Rene’ and Jack were gone, off to do some “back to school” clothes shopping with our grandson, AJ, at the Mall. I’d rather dust and vacuum and mop and sweat up a storm any day than shop at the Mall so I was perfectly fine with staying behind and finishing my chore list despite the heat.
When I was done with my work, I decided to wander out to the vegetable garden and score some raspberries. In normal summer, the raspberries and black raspberries we grow would be long gone. But this year, as I’ve written before, things are odd. Everything is about a month behind. The canes in the garden should be empty by now. They aren’t.
Cloquet River raspberries
See what I mean? Late August and I managed to gather two pints or more of fresh raspberries to douse in milk, spice up my corn flakes, or plop on a scoop of vanilla ice cream. When I was done berry picking, I cleaned the berries, put them in the fridge, and sidled up to our bedroom to change. Dressed in my swimming suit, towel jauntily tossed over a shoulder, I stepped onto the rear porch of our house to put on my water shoes. That’s where the title to this blog came from. When I stuck my right foot deep into my water shoe, I felt something very squishy blocking my toes.
“Kena,” I asked our new Lab puppy who was eagerly awaiting our walk to the river, “did you poop in my shoe?”
Undaunted by what I might find, I removed my foot from the rubber shoe, reached inside, and discovered the source of my surprise.
Eastern gray tree frog
We usually hear these little buggers as dusk settles in. Even out of mating season, they are loud callers. We often find them hiding amongst the logs stacked on our wood rack out on our covered front porch. This one apparently decided that my water shoe, moist and smelly, made a nice resting spot against the heat. Thankfully, it seemed unfazed by being nearly squished by my toes. I pulled the frog out of the shoe and placed it gently on the railing of our rear porch, noting the brilliant yellow splotches that run along its underside. I snapped a couple of photos and then, confident the frog would find another place to escape the unseasonable weather, descended the stairs with Kena in tow.
Peace.
Mark
You can learn more about this amphibian, and the rest of Minnesota’s frogs and toads, at http://www.herpnet.net/Minnesota-Herpetology/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=61:eastern-gray-treefrog-hyla-versicolor&catid=41:minnesota-frogs-toads-and-treefrogs&Itemid=63.
