#chasing frogs | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

whatbloglol · 6 months ago

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Ok so… I’m not a writer. And I’m not an artist. But I have this memory of a time and place in my life that I would like to get back to, so I’m going to try my hand at describing the place/feeling with words and maybe one of my experiences there. Here goes…

The summer heat was never as bad when I was a child. As a young body of about 7 to 9 years old, my energy and endurance were near boundless. Eyes bright and cheeks ruddy, I was glad to start another day at the horse farm that my grandaunt -and-uncle owned up in the small town of Fairfield, Illinois.

My mamaw had supposedly grown up in the area—I’ll have to remember to ask her about it later for confirmation—and I can only imagine what that must’ve been like. Papaw tells me that when he was my age, “you could sit all day and watch the road and not see a single car go by.” I remember laughing, giddy with the opportunity to tease him. “That’s because cars weren’t even INVENTED yet!” I didn’t look at him. I don’t know if I was right or not… that’s just how we expressed familial love at the time. We teased each other, sometimes self deprecating in the process. His own mother, before she passed away, used to say that when G-d said “Let there be Light,” she was there to flip the switch.

But I digress…

Me, a bright-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, tough little pony-tailed tomboy standing on top of the hill in front of the farm house… ready to see what new trouble I could get into.

I peeked down the hill at a small plastic drainage pipe that stuck out from the slope, looking for the massive bullfrog that I knew lived there. I had caught sight of him yesterday after we arrived, and resolved to myself that I would catch him before the few days we planned to spend there were over. And sure enough, there he was, sitting his massive butt on the edge of the drainage pipe, water trickling slowly from under him. I knew that if I could sneak up behind him and block his escape back into the pipe, he was mine. There was no else for him to go, the grass around the pipe short from having been mowed recently, and no other holes close enough to hide in. Slowly… silently… not unlike a ninja or a tarantula stalking its prey, my pink sparkly jellie shoes traversed the distance. He flinched. He shifted his position a little. I froze. Did he see me? No, not yet. I crept forward again, preparing to strike not at the frog himself, but at the hole buried in the hill. A smart one, I thought I was, having the intelligence to learn after a previously failed attempt that the real challenge was beating him to the hole. Another shift. It was now or never. I took one more half step and leapt low into the air, aiming to come down above the hole to cover it with my hands.

It didn’t work… the half step was too much and he saw me. As I landed, my hands covered the front of the hole, trapping him inside. But he was too far in there for me to see, let alone reach, and I knew better than to stick my hands into dark holes. Dang it… maybe he’ll come back out in a few hours.

Time passes and there are plenty of things to see and do on the farm. Sure, breeding and selling horses was where their money came from, but they were a bit homestead-y as well, with chickens, goats, peacocks, fishing pond, and a Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog named “Dusty” that lived with his little long-haired chihuahua-mix partner “Dagwood” in the crawlspace under the house. Dusty was sweet but preferred the company of the other animals. Dagwood was feisty and high-energy, barking and trotting circles around the two of us as I scooped some dry dog food into their bowls. Taking a couple of handfuls of the smelly pellets for myself and stuffing then into my pockets, I ambled on down the hill and towards the fishing pond.

I passed by the wooden picnic tables set up at the bottom of the hill, shaded by several trees where the adults sat and chatted. There were a lot of family members here that I didn’t know, amongst aunts and uncles and cousins that had come with me on the RV ride over. “Didja get ‘im yet, Charli?” I looked over to see a thin, yet pear-shaped woman with tan skin, short cut-off jeans, a tank top, and a pixie-type hair cut sitting in a lawn chair with her legs crossed. My grandaunt Virginia, trying (and succeeding) to look younger than she was. In hindsight, the farm life was good for her. It kept her in shape. Words like “thin” and “tan” really didn’t run in my side family, with most of those who sired me being more on the side of “portly” and “pasty.” Mamaw and Papaw were sitting close by, chuckling a little at me as I shrugged my shoulders towards her, letting my arms and head hang to exaggerate the body language of defeat. She took a slow drag from her cigarette and blew it quickly into the air, flicking the ash onto the ground beside her. She chuckled along with her sister and brother-in-law. “Better luck next time!” I nodded solemnly to her as I grabbed a cane pole from a nearby tool shed.

The edge of fishing pond was only a several meters away from the back of the shed. I stood between the two spots, out of sight of the adults at the picnic tables. On the left side of the pond were two big, beautiful willow trees standing on either side of a drainage hole, no doubt there to keep the pond from overflowing when it rained. Not that I understood things like that at the time… What I DID know in that moment were two things. First, that it was NOT as cool as it might seem to hide and play under the leaves of a willow tree, because it was absolutely full of the blood-sucking types of bugs that would make my skin an itchy, miserable mess. Second, dog food is pretty decent fish bait.

On the left side of the pond was a dock, jutting out towards the middle, with a large plastic bucket sitting atop it. I jogged over to it and knelt down to the water, digging in my pocket and throwing a small handful of dog food out into the water. Nearby. I sat, silent and cross-legged on the edge for a minute or two while I watched the fish in the pond hungrily gobble up my offering. Perfect. I emptied my pockets into a little pile beside me on the dock.

I learned this trick on my first visit here last year from one of the local country boys that would come by and hang out with us. Nothing better to do in a small town than to be neighborly, I guess. With a single piece of dog food between two fingers, I dipped it into the water and counted to fifteen, then brought it back up. I wasn’t here to catch the big fish like my dad and uncle were trying to do from their lawn chairs at the deep end of the pond. I was here to catch the “brim.” They were smaller than the quarry the adults were after, but very quintessentially fish-like, complete with fins, gills, side-facing eyeballs… the whole works. I didn’t know it at the time, but as an adult I later found out that they were Bluegill. Or at least maybe they were related to them? Because they weren’t very blue…

Anyway! Don’t let me get too side-tracked, now. After about fifteen seconds of soaking a single piece of dog food, it was just soft enough that I was able to thread it onto the hook without it falling apart. And now, the fun part… swinging that line out into the same area as the previous offering, knowing that my little victims were still hungry. Fishing for brim was easy and fun. It didn’t require a lot of money or patience… perfect for a child. Within mere seconds I felt a little vibration and then a light tugging. I pulled up on the pole, and… voila! A fish! It flopped and squirmed, no doubt confused by the thin feeling air, of dryness, of gravity, of the warm (perhaps burning?) feeling of the sun-drenched wooden dock as I held it down gently with my foot to remove the hook. It was no-doubt terrified, having been so rudely extracted from the only existence it’s ever known—a place where it moved freely and effortlessly in just about any direction it wanted, picking and pecking at whatever it fancied as food. But of course that’s not something I had the mental capacity fathom as I grabbed it by its bottom lip and tossed its body into the water-filled bucket beside me. The adults set this up for some unknown reason… called it a “live-well.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but if they didn’t dry out and die, and I didn’t have to throw them back in, I was satisfied.

The bucket was always mysteriously empty if I ever left and came back to it. I found out later that one of the adults would collect the bucket and replace it with another one. Whilst I was busy chasing chickens, getting bopped in the head by a goat I tried to milk, or grabbing handfuls of weeds to hand-feed the horses that would come up to me at the edge of the hotwire fence that kept us safely separated, the adults would take the fish the kids caught and chop them up into pieces to bait the trotline. And a trotline, I found out later, is a long rope with larger fishing hooks hanging down from it in intervals. My dad and uncles would bait these hooks with the cut up pieces of the smaller fish and stretch the line across the deep end of the pond. After a while, they’d lift it up to see what they had caught: enough catfish for the fish fry we ate for dinner that same evening.

In confidence, my Papaw told me later: “Don’t tell anybody you caught your fish with dog food. Some of them around here think that if you catch them with dog food, that THEY are eating dog food, too.”

**Not really the end but I’m tired of writing now. What do y’all think?**

#childhood memory #small town #farm #fishing #horse farm #first time writing #chasing frogs #life in the country #tell me what you think #aunts and uncles #family #grandparents

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