Attack of the Tiny Frogs

Attack of the Tiny Frogs

   A few years ago the boyfriend and I moved out of Titusville (story to come later) and to a new house right outside of the Mouse (Disney for the rest of you). It took us forever to find a house we actually both liked that did not have a family of bugs still living in it or mold growing out of every corner. There were houses where the owner thought it was a good idea to knock down supporting walls or paint murals of things I don’t even like repeating. Crazy neighbors with barb wire were a big turn off and the strangest one was a house that apparently people were squatting in as the prison letters on the dresser and the clothes in the bathtub gave away. When we finally found this house, with its tasteful furniture included, beautiful view and open floor plan it was perfect the minute we walked in and we put in an offer then and there. It took us a while but eventually we got the house we wanted and with our joint ownership with survivorship or gay rights as they called it, we moved in.
     We had only been in the house about a month when I came home from a late night at work. The boyfriend and I had just finished dinner and decided to sit and relax in front of the new big TV before bed. “I never thought it would stop raining, “ I commented as we sat down for the first time that day. It was true that it had rained for nearly a week and tonight was the first time it had tapered off and stopped. Out of nowhere, we heard two loud smashing sounds against our garage door. Figuring our teenage neighborhood hoodlums were at it again, we peeked out the front window, turned on the porch lights, nothing. “Must have been the wind” the boyfriend commented and we went back to the couch. A short while later, something else caught our attention. Our cat, Bella, was jumping. “What the hell?” the boyfriend said and we rolled off the couch to see why in the world our three year old black panther of a cat was leaping around like a Cirque De Soile extra. As we got closer, the boyfriend reached down and cupped his hands around something I couldn’t see. “It’s a frog,” he said opening his hands to the tiniest frog I had ever seen. It was the size of my thumb nail but was furiously trying to escape with the energy of a rabbit on Red Bull. “Get the door,” he said as the cat tried to climb his leg to reclaim her prize. As I opened the door for him to reintroduce the frog to its real habitat, three bright green frogs the size of golf balls clung desperately to our front door. Our teenage hooligans were these amphibians leaping onto the door. “Holy shit! What is going on here?” I yelled as one of the door clingers crept to the opposite, inside part of the door. So the boyfriend flung the little frog and now in one motion, grabbed and flung this new frog.
      Now let me interject for a minute, we love this house, but this was a vacation home. Although it’s in great shape, there are somethings that were overlooked because no one lived here for an extended period of time. The air conditioner was run itself to death and every inch of available space had a bed on it. One area that must have been ignored was the weather stripping at the bottom of the front door. In the daylight, small streaks of light shine under the worn out rubber under the door. Normally, it’s not an issue. Sure we are losing some air conditioning, but nothing big. We’ll fix it later and later was not before this night of frogs.
    So, as we begin to walk back to our TV show, Bella begins to hop again and sure enough there is another frog. I look behind my shoes by the door, and now there is another one and as Bill leans down to grab one, he watches another one squeeze under the door. Now we got a problem. “Get something to put them in, I’ll get something to put under the door,” the boyfriend commended as if we were now no longer in Florida but the trenches of Iraq. This was war.  The only thing I could think of was a Tupperware container. It had a lid and I would keep letting air in, it would be fine. So the three of us, Bella sniffing them out, and the both of us catching these frogs while now frantically trying to shove newspaper under the door, became this frenzy of yelling, grabbing and jumping. If someone had seen, I’d be writing this from the loony bin.  We managed to block the bottom of the door, but now we had to round up the rest of these frogs. Some had managed to venture as far as the bedroom and I knew I’d spend the hours of the night instead of sleeping, imagining and pulling baby frogs off my legs in bed. Close to an hour later, we seemed to have found them all. 16 little frogs and one big one had lead an attack on our house and although they put up a good fight, they were all captured. As we threw the prisoners out into the backyard through the screened in porch door, suddenly I felt like I was in a real life horror movie. Crawling all over our screened in pool were these small dots moving higher and higher. Might as well cue the creepy background music as the boyfriend shined his flashlight on at least 50 tiny frogs trying to find the fault with the screen. As I tried to run, the boyfriend stopped me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They won’t make it past the pool.” Like any good horror movie, in the morning at least half of the frogs on the screen were floating in the pool like zombies the morning after.
    “We’re fixing the front door,” I told the boyfriend as we fished out the bloated tiny bodies out of the filter. And almost three years later, we did just that.