The Night Harold Calls About the Peepers

I was down at the woodpile with the splitting maul when the rain turned warm. It had been a winter rain all morning, tapping on the tin roof of the shed like gravel. Then sometime after noon something changed in it. The drops got bigger. The air stopped biting. The snow at the edge of the driveway, gray and crusted for weeks, began to sink, and the top few inches went soft and wet, and I could smell the mud underneath before I could see it.

That first open mud of the year has a smell like nothing else. It is not the deep garden smell of April. It is the smell of the ground waking up, and it carries. I stood over the split wood and breathed it in. The pile was down to the last dozen pieces — the good dry oak I had split in January, when the cold made the grain go clean. After this, the rest was the soft knotty stuff that smokes anyway, and I would rather let it sit than burn it.

Somewhere out beyond the yard, where the field drops to the pond, I thought I heard a single note. It was thin and high, like a sleigh bell with the clapper taken out. I held my breath. The rain dripped off the eave. Nothing else came.

I did not tell Lynne about it. I was not about to be wrong.

Harold

Harold lives up the road with the blue tarp over his woodpile and a sugarhouse that is more patch than wall. He taps his maples the old way, with buckets, and every March he phones us the day his sap starts. Not to sell anything. Just to say so.

“Sap’s running,” he says. Or: “Buds aren’t in it yet. Sap’s sweet as a nut.” And one year: “The crows are fighting over the suet. Spring’s on the way.”

I never learned to read those signs. I grew up in a town of small lawns, where spring was the day you stopped wearing a coat to the bus stop. Lynne grew up here, in this county, and the first time she took me to the pond was the March after we moved in. Rainy, mild, mud up over my laces. She said there was something I needed to hear. I was cold, and I was ruining my good boots for no reason I could see.

Then we reached the bottom of the field, and the whole pond began to sing.

I remember standing there with my mouth open, not believing so many frogs could fit into that little stretch of water. The sound was not loud like noise. It was loud like weather. It came off the dark water in a sheet, and it did not stop. Lynne laughed at my face. “There,” she said. “Now you know March.”

After that I started every March listening for it. And Harold started calling.

The night the peepers begin

The night it happened this year, I carried the last of the oak inside and hung the maul in the shed. Lynne had the radio on low in the kitchen. She said Harold had phoned about the sap, and had added something else: he had walked down by the pond and heard them tuning up. He thought tonight would be the night.

“How does he know?” I said.

“He says the ground’s warm. He can feel it through his boots.”

We ate supper late. The rain thinned to a drizzle, then to nothing. The windows fogged over. At nine the phone rang, and it was Harold, and he did not even say hello.

“Come on down,” he said. “They’re going.”

We pulled on our boots — the old ones this time, not the good ones — and walked down the driveway, out the yard gate, and across the wet field. The ground gave with every step. Harold was already at the pond’s edge, hands in his coat pockets, steaming gently in the cold air. He had not come down to be alone. He had come to bring us the news.

The pond was ringing like a telephone.

That is the only way I can describe it. A whole field of high, thin notes, every one the same, all of them slightly out of time with each other, so the sound shimmered and rose and fell. When I was a kid, someone told me the peepers were the sound of spring coming up through the ground. That is wrong — they are frogs, and they are in the water — but I believed it then, and I still sort of believe it now. Because that is what it sounds like. The year coming up.

Harold took his hands out of his pockets and pointed across the water with his chin. “Look at that,” he said. “Every night from now on.”

We stood in the wet grass and listened a long time. Our house was a lit square up the hill. The pond sang. Harold told the story of the year the peepers started the night of the big thaw, and then it froze for a week and they went silent. He told everyone they had lied. Then the frost came out, and they started again, thicker than ever. “Don’t bet against the little ones,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.”

That brought back the year Maya was small. She was five, maybe six. We took her down on a night just like this one, and she brought her flashlight, and she shone it into the reeds, and the singing stopped dead. She was heartbroken, sure she had ruined it. We stood in the dark in the wet grass and waited. She kept the light off. After a long minute one frog tried a note, then another, braver, and then they were all at it again, and Maya whispered “sorry” into the dark, and laughed. She slept with her window open all that March.

I do not know why that came back to me just then. The pond was full of the same sound, and we were the same three people — Harold older, Lynne and me older, the field the same, the water the same — and the sound was exactly what it must have been the night she was born.

What comes after

We walked Harold up to the road and watched his flashlight swing away up the hill. On the porch, Lynne went in to fill the kettle, and I stayed out a minute longer. The sound followed me up the slope, softer, but there. It was like standing in a room where somebody else is humming.

The rest of March can do what it wants now. It can snow, and it often does. The peepers will go quiet for a cold night or two, but they will not stay quiet. That is what I have learned: after that first warm rain, the year comes up through the ground whether anyone is ready or not. The maples are tapped. The mud is open. The pond is ringing.

I stood until my ears went cold, listening, because I know how fast it stops being news. By April the peepers are just the background, like the furnace hum. But for a few nights in March they are the whole story.

Inside, Lynne had set out three mugs without asking, and the kettle was coming up. She had left the back door cracked so the sound could get in.

“He’ll be out there all night,” she said.

I did not doubt it. I sat down at the table, and the window was open a crack, and the pond was still at it — a long way off, thin as thread, telling everybody that it was March.

Photos: Wildreturn (CC BY 2.0)