The Tree Frogs Remembered

The tree frogs snore in the rain

July 14, 2026

8:22 a.m.

Sitting outside on the back porch.

It feels like it's been raining for days. There are great big puddles in the bright green grass, and tree frogs yelling—or singing—from the places they rest or call home. I'm not sure which. They sound like the short snore of an old man on a mountain, only knowing two notes, two parts of a breath: in and out.

I imagine there are hundreds of them out there in my neighborhood, creating a cacophony of tree frog snores.

Why do they only sound off in the rain?

Heavy rain?

Rain for days with warnings of flash flooding, in a world where the sorrows of unshakable floods burrow through virgin land and unsuspecting families to create a new world no person ever desired, ever dreamed about, except in their nightmares. Night terrors of what life would be like without their mothers, their fathers, their children, their babies who, twenty minutes earlier, played games like Charades and Chutes and Ladders, only they didn't know they'd never be able to climb out of the water.

The only relief being—they say drowning is the most beautiful way to die, when the living agrees it would be horrific.

Maybe drowning, through the waters, wherever they may be—land or sea—quickens the purification, the journey to heaven.

Would that even be a consolation for those who remain?

If they believe, maybe.

But only after years of healing a scar that builds the highest ridges and mountain peaks, where, at the edge, the hard pink, white, or brown shiny dead skin joins with the healthy pink, brown, or white fleshy tones, ready to rip and tear at the seams until one day the scar no longer hurts or threatens to rip open again. It only aches when the memory of how the scar formed rises.

Does one ever truly heal?

Or are we just walking around as a tangle of shiny lines shooting off in every direction?

Some thinking maybe if I draw a scar on that person way over there, the one I don't even know—or maybe closer than that, on someone I do know—maybe mine will heal and disappear.

Does transference of pain really ever work?

Maybe for a moment.

But the thought, the theory, is suspicious because, in the end, the transference isn't transference at all, but rather it compounds, slathering another layer of butter on the burn.

For those too young to know, there were mothers and grandmothers who thought they were soothing their babies after slapping their toddler's hand away from the burning hot red coil atop the stove, only to kiss away the tears with a good slather from half a stick of butter from the refrigerator—the same stick that still bore the silken corn-on-the-cob strings from the family barbecue the day before.

For those who don't know, fresh garden corn tastes best after it's rolled in a stick of soft real butter and covered with a fine or thick layer of salt—and some, usually the older generation, pepper it too.

If you were lucky, that corn sat next to a hamburger cooked by none other than the grandfather, the garden tender. The grandfather who picked cucumbers and tomatoes for all the women—four generations—and their husbands to slice and sprinkle with more salt from the antique shakers that came all the way from Chicago by train to Maine.

The shakers that escaped the Great Chicago Fire carried out by a woman who hoisted and hauled an entire bureau roped to her back, filled with tea towels and a shawl her mother knit and stitched by firelight back in Sweden, made from the wool of sheep passed down from daughter to daughter to daughter for seven generations, until the last daughter didn't have any daughters—only sons by blood.

The seventh daughter sits listening to the tree frogs on this rainy morning, deep in the Louisiana bayou, squinting to see into the future, wondering if she'll live long enough to meet any granddaughters or great-granddaughters, like the women before her who were blessed with lives filled with family barbecues and moments of storytelling about the women who came before—from Sweden to Chicago by boat, to Maine by train, to Louisiana by car and truck and van and plane.

She stops writing long enough to ask the tree frogs,

"Will I live long enough to meet a girl of my bloodline, to pass on the woven shawl?"

Their collective snore vibrates and reverberates, and she can even detect an echo that travels down to the water, the bayou rising with each drop of rain that threatens to swell and spill.

They do not wake up to give her an answer.

So she asks again.

Immediately, she hears her own mother's voice.

Her mother, who has herself passed through the blue waters into heaven some two years now.

And she, the daughter, hears her mother's singing voice from almost half a century ago.

"Oh, Princess, oh, Princess, let us up. Oh, Princess, oh, Princess, remember your promise by the well. Oh, Princess, oh, Princess, let us up."

The Frog Prince in that story turned this daughter into a princess, one whose mother would wake her every morning—not just through childhood, but well into her forties.

Even at the last visit they shared, the mother woke the daughter with those words:

"Oh, Princess, oh, Princess, let us up."

And that's what this tree frog meeting was for.

To remember.

To wind up and down over the obstacles of the land.

To hear her mother's voice once more.