As a city girl transplanted into the country, I’ve had a lot that I’ve needed to learn to get used to. But there’s one thing that is driving me absolutely batty.
And it’s not the bats that fly overhead at night (way overhead, thank goodness).
Nor is it the sound of crickets in the evening. Or of birds chirping in the morning.
All these things are quite wonderful.
What I can’t stand are the frogs.
Yeah, you heard me—frogs.
Again, I’m a city kid at heart. I thought that frogs spent their lives jumping around, eating flies, and letting out an occasional “ribbit.”
Boy, was I wrong.
Evidently, during their mating season, frogs are a bit, um, loud.
Okay, they are ridiculously loud. This wouldn’t be such a problem in the middle or the end of a Baltimore summer because it’s usually so dang hot that we have the windows shut, and the air conditioning on the “freeze your eyebrows off” setting.
But frogs don’t know what month it is. At least not in the calendar sense.
So they begin in April, when the weather is still nice here, and you can sleep with the windows open.
Except that I couldn’t because they wouldn’t shut up.
“BAAAAARRRRAAAAACCCCCCKKKKK,” one frog would screech, usually beginning about dusk.
“BAAAAARRRAAAACCCCCKKKKK,” the other would answer.
This back-and-forth continues at least until the middle of the night. How do I know? Because my lovely husband suggested that we try to sleep with the windows open despite the sounds of frogs in heat.
Guess who was sleeping through it? Guess who wasn’t?
Sometime after midnight, I slammed the windows shut, and put on the AC.
“What’s going on?” my husband mumbled from his trip in la-la land.
“I can’t sleep with the frogs making so much noise,” I said.
Of course, by the time I finished this sentence, he was already back to sleep. What is wrong with this picture, people?
As you may have noticed, when our frogs make noise, they sound exactly like they are calling out the name of our President.
“Barack!!! Baaaaarrrrraaaaacccckkkk! Barack!” they call out each night.
I had no idea that frogs were Democrats—and that they like Obama. Amazing what you learn about the animal world.
I got so frustrated with our frogs that I looked up how to kill them.
I know; I know. Bad me. I couldn’t really do it. I just thought that it would give me pleasure if I knew that I could if I really wanted to.
Here are some fun facts I learned about our web-footed friends: a group of them is called an army or a colony. Yeah, they sure sound like an army. A loud army.
They go to the water to mate. Yet another great reason to have a pool in the backyard.
And they help their surroundings because they eat mosquito larvae.
Great. Now they’re helpful. This really ticked me off. How could I feel good about yelling “Die, damned frogs, die!” when I now knew that they keep mosquitoes from attacking me.
The only “wildlife” we had while I was in the city were pigeons, water bugs, and rats. While all of them are much more disgusting than frogs, at least they weren’t keeping me up at night.
One evening, I was in our upstairs bathroom, and I noticed something really strange.
It was completely quiet. And it was dark out.
I opened the window. No noise.
I called my husband over. “The frogs are gone!” I exclaimed. Life was good again.
Then just for kicks, I yelled out into the dark of night “BAAAARRRRAAACCKKKK!”
A few seconds later, the unthinkable happened.
“BAAAAARRRRRAAAAACCCCCKKKKK!!!!
The frog answered me. A minute later, the two frogs began their nightly ritual of calling back and forth to one another.
In that one moment, I doomed our silence and learned that I am bilingual. I now know I can speak “frog.”
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not trying to desperately get used to the sounds of the country (and often turning up the volume on the TV so that she can go to sleep), writes Wojo’s World™ from her office in Baltimore. Check her out on Facebook at www.facebook.com/WojosWorldFanPage or on Twitter @wojosworldtm.