The porch light did not bother him,
nor my flashlight, not the camera flash.
He was on a mission to feed,
having already eaten, it seemed, his entire family
and become fat as a bear cub.
The technique is, to spare himself acrobatics: tilt and spill.
Tilt a little, spill a little more,
then dine at ease along the rail.
I slammed the back door, four feet from him,
and he dove over the rail, to hide under the house,
for almost three minutes.
Jun 15
The orange one returned yesterday. The cup without a seedling was not what he had in mind, but neither was the seedling. They shared for a while; afterwards, fluffed and straightened up a bit, the seedling was unhurt.
Orange is the old toad.
Today a smaller gray visitor occupied the same toad-tested cup most of the morning. Why did he come? Why that cup? Why did he go? Will he return? To that cup?
We see you, too, but it’s not the same.
The slot eyes are fathomless, solid black, ten million years deep. Not a hostile stare, but fixed and judging. I am glad we have not disturbed the pristine watershed that extends 1200 feet (vertically, 1800 along the ground) up from the house to the Little Bald, glad that our gardening is (almost perfectly) organic. That will be in your report, won’t it?
Sharing with the toad.
The bushman laughed, asked what was underneath the turtle that carried the earth on its back. It’s just turtles, he said, turtles all the way down.
I think, all the way up, it’s toads. The eye of heaven is the omniscient unblinking eye of the highest and holiest toad in the stack.
Are our visitors one of the varieties that excretes psychedelic sweat? We shall not try that question; it would be presumption of a most unwholesome and disturbing sort. We are better for not knowing.
To be visited, that is enough; allowed to host.