Lift Up Your Hearts!

What a wonderful bird the frog are
When he stand he sit almos';
When he hop he fly almos'.

He ain't got no sense hardly;
He ain't got no tail hardly either.
When he sit, he sit on what he ain't got—almos'.

When the kids were young, we listened (and listened, and listened) to Mitzie Collins' incomparable Sounds Like Fun record (yes, it was an LP record) of children's songs.  Before we left Rochester, Heather had the privilege of attending a friend's Chanukah party at which Mitzie was the featured entertainer.  Janet was too young to attend, but in one of those amazing twists of life returned to Rochester for college and ended up working as an intern with Mitzie, and playing in some of her concerts.

So it was not all that surprising that this brief song should hop into my mind this morning, as I sat on our porch swing in the semi-darkness and watched a large, yellow tree frog's progress.  He started about 10 feet away from me, and his first movements were tentative; perhaps he was checking me out.  I must have passed, because he then leapt closer, and in less than a blink of an eye transported himself from the ground to the table next to me.  We watched each other for quite a while, but then I turned my head to look at the source of a noise behind me, and when I turned back, he was gone.  After some searching, I located him:  he was clinging to the back of a chair further away from the table than the table had been from the ground.  Then, as I watched, he apparated to the metal frame of our sliding glass doors, then used his sticky, splayed feet to navigate around the glass itself.  My suspicion is that he was attracted by the light.

"Fly almos'" isn't strong enough language to describe the frog's wonderful motion.  He was in one place—then in another.  I'm almost certain that a video, replayed in slow motion, would show that he passed through the intervening distance...but that's not what my eyes saw.

What a wonderful bird the frog are!