thoughts on frogs

Reading a thread about an unwanted lizard house guest make me think about my college roommate, R, who I haven't talked to in a very long time. R had a tattoo of a big green tree frog on the back of her leg. A friend of hers, for some reason, decided that since R obviously liked tree frogs that she should have one as a pet. Why people give live animals as gifts I will never know.

I think R was less than impressed with the tree frog but set it up in an aquarium in her room. The frog ate pinkies, which are newborn mice. The pinkies were frozen but had to be thawed prior to being fed to the frog. (I had pet snakes at the time so this wasn't anything unfamiliar to me.) R was a vegetarian so she was already unimpressed with having frozen mice in the fridge (hey, are mice better or worse than a placenta in the fridge?) and even less impressed with having to feed them herself. She had talked about giving the frog away but never did.

Fast forward about 6 months down the road. My XH and I were moving out and had the sliding door in the kitchen open, sweeping the floor. In hops the little tree frog, much skinnier than last time I had seen it. (Tree frogs were not common in that area at all.) I went upstairs to her room and sure enough, the cage was empty. I put the frog back in the cage and decided to talk to her next time I saw her, telling her that if she didn't want the frog I would take it but not to just dump it outside.

A few days later I run into her and she asks, with an odd look on her face, if I had seen her tree frog. Apparently she had come back home from a late night clubbing (with quite a bit of alcohol and perhaps some fine herbal substances involved) and climbed into bed, only to look over and see two tree frogs sitting on the log, looking at her. She blinked a few times, chalked it up to too much partying and went to bed. The next morning when she had sobered up there were still two tree frogs in the cage.

I laughed my butt off and explained what had happened, she was relieved to know she wasn't going crazy. That was 11 years ago and I still think about her every time I see a tree frog.