frogger

We had a little storm come through last week. It was just enough to blow a transformer in the neighborhood, leaving us without power for three hours. No wi-fi, no air conditioner, no street lights. We finally got sick of sitting in upstairs apartment that was just getting warmer and warmer, so we decided to make the most of it and go out to get ice cream. We pulled out of the darkened garage onto the extremely dark road and noticed that the road seemed to be strewn with leaves. This was somewhat odd because the leaves around here are perfectly green and are hanging on to the trees quite heartily. They're not going anywhere.

That's when we noticed...well...they weren't leaves.  It went something like this:

Pardon my lack of ink drawing skills.

Yeah. Frogs.

You see, there's a retaining pond across the street from us, where the frogs serenade us with a lovely tune every night. When the weather gets wet (which doesn't happen much these days), they venture out and about the neighborhood. It's not usually in these numbers though...

My son and I were screaming and there was nothing we could do about it.We drive forward - we run over frogs. We drive backwards to go back where we came from - we run over frogs. We stop in the middle of the road, we'd still have to move when another car came along to run over even more frogs.  There were too many to try to dodge. It was horrible. I did the only thing I could do - put my foot on the gas and get it over with, while saying mantras for and apologizing to the poor little froggies that were about to meet their demise. We finally got past the block of hopping amphibians and made our way to McDonalds, but we had no appetite. How many frogs had we possibly killed? It was like the world's worst game of Frogger.

When we went home, still in the dark as the power hadn't been restored yet, we made the decision to bypass that road and go in the back way, but once we got to the driveway, the frogs appeared again. I stopped dead in my tracks. The kid got out and started herding the cute little guys off the asphalt. When all was clear, I finally pulled into the frog-free safety of the garage.

I won't even mention the horror of the sight of many, many frog corpses strewn all over the road the next morning when I went out for my run.

A moment of silence for our green friends, please.