Summer with Frogs

I can’t get my mind off the summer with frogs and how night after night—coming home from church or a ball game—dad ran over them with the van. The sound was so distinct that even now so many years later, far away and cold, I can hear it. It was the summer I liked to walk to the store with Becky Kearns. We’d buy Cheerwine and Pop Rocks and talk for miles. I was miserable, wanted to slit my wrists and let them bleed in a washtub.

This morning, reading Virginia Woolf’s “The Cinema,” I find body for the feeling that haunted me that summer. In discussing a performance in which a shape that resembled a tadpole appears on the screen, Woolf writes, “It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged…For a moment it seemed to embody some monstrous disease of the lunatic’s mind.” When Becky and I walked to the store I never mentioned my misery. We sifted carefully through words as the sun freckled our shoulders and baked the frogs deep into the asphalt.

What we couldn’t say then, we can’t say now. When I try to hold the unsaid in my mind, I think of what Woolf calls “some secret language which we feel and see but never speak.” That summer, someone in the neighborhood said it was the end of the world—frogs just falling from the sky—but they seem to have been wrong. There is laundry to be done, teeth to be brushed, and when I take a moment to forget about the winter, spring feels nothing if not inevitable.