Approaching Frog and Maple Time

I’ve always been tuned into the big rolling wheel of the seasons. I hold a deep reverence for things that move in cycles (most things), and so take any opportunity I can direct attention to seasonal change. I’m always surprised when I realize that not everyone sees time as this deep cycle of millions of seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter without end) wheeling along from Big Bang to Eternity. Seasonal change is my baseline, my stock market, my creed, my insurance policy against meaninglessness and deep doubt.

So do me a favor and look and listen carefully this week, and I’ll bet you will see and hear spring opening the rusty trap door and creeping back into the woods and yards around your house just like I do.

You might think this celebration is a little premature. After all, only a week ago it was deep South Carolina winter: 20 degrees and windy. The rhododendron leaves under our front window were curled tight against the branches. But on the big wheel of the seasons, winter has now almost rolled past. It’s only a little over three weeks before spring officially arrives on March 21st.

For me, there are two leading heralds of hopeful return of spring: the appearance of a misty red sheen in the woods and frog sounds. The tiny flowers of the common native red maples are just now emerging along the roadsides, and around here the frogs began calling several nights ago when the air turned a little warmer and heavy rain blew through the area.

We have plenty of red maples near us because we’re next to the creek, and they may like the swamp forest in the floodplain most of all. They also grow up in abandoned fields, a first pioneer filling the space. I read that you can make maple syrup from their sap, though it has less sugar than their famous cousin, the far-North’s sugar maple. If we did some sugaring down here it would be a little late for tapping. The maple sap’s already risen, and the red flowers are already beginning to appear.

This is our fifth spring here and each year the frogs have called in the river bottom behind our house. I’ve come to expect them, and welcome them, even celebrate their emergence. I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself a worshipper of frogs, but I might say that I worship every spring at an alter they point toward: seasonal change. It’s an ageless form of worship, and I count myself proudly still among its acolytes.

I’ve built three small ponds under our bedroom window to lure the frogs closer to the house. When it gets a little warmer we’ll sleep with frogs of various types singing under the windows. They’re not exactly hymns, but they’ll do.

Frogs aren’t like ducks and geese. They don’t migrate through our holy land depending on the weather. They are resident spirits. They share the zip code through cold and warm weather. They’ve wintered over in the mud or wedged under rotting wood where it might be little warmer. They emerge ready to celebrate and to love. The rains the last few days make it look like it could be a good frog year. The cycles seem to be holding. If I’d been born 3,000 years ago I’d have been a content druid watching my stone circle about now to see the equinox sun land where it did the year before and the year before that. I’m easily convinced by such observations, and I admire nature’s complexity more than human nature’s complications.

But I’m no druid in spite of all this talk about frogs and maples and the sun’s regular course. I’m a latter day 21st century Methodist-born skeptic with a weak spot for nature study and apocalypse. Last night “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Oscar for best documentary, and despite the hopeful singing of the frogs outside our window I worried about the end of the world as I know and love it, and how we’re altering the seasonal patterns I love.

Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore’s documentary exposes the convenient lie that we as a single species have no effect on the changing climate of our planet. Will that lie persist through the seasons of my lifetime?