Leap Year

In 1972, our family migrated to Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My parents purchased a sprawling rancher on the affluent side of an otherwise impoverished rural town. We owned the only in the ground swimming pool in town. Although we thought the pool was no big deal, it caught the animal kingdom by surprise. In the dead of a memorable summer night, family members awoke from sleep to hear strange movement traveling across the rooftop. Not resoundingly peaceful with the night hours in a strange land anyway, the odd commotion right above my head caused a boy scare.

I fretted to myself, “Dear God, who or what could be on our rooftop?”

Other than my parents settling their children back into beds, I do not remember any further action taken by my parents. I only remember being scared until the sandbags of slumber superseded fright.

The next morning we discovered that our swimming pool became a watery grave to many frogs. As my father and I circled the pool, we noticed that the recently departed were by no means garden variety frogs. Huge bullfrogs sporting muscular Olympian legs littered the chlorinated water. As a wide-eyed ten-year-old boy, I remember being astonished by their stature. When frogs the size of squirrels can scale a tall building by leaps and bounds, something may have gone askew with the natural selection process. Trying to arrange extradition for the frogs, I lacked the strength to lift a single water-logged frog from the pool using a pole net.

A logical explanation never surfaced to remove this incident from the Tornatore X-Files. I can only imagine that our property was in direct line with the migration of frogs. The deafening noise heard on the rooftop must have been an incredible breed of frogs that could jump right over our single story house. I don’t like to jump to conclusions but...never move to Virginia during leap year.