For the Love of Toad

I really, really love toads. There has always been a toad, forever and ever, that lives in my mother's greenhouse. Some years the toad spent sunny afternoons in a little pillow of baby's breath on the gravel floor. Some winters she bedded in a potted plant... geranium, cyclamen, begonia - a soft rising and falling of the peat soil after watering. Always the same big toad, the size of a whole heaping handful? I don't suppose, but I don't know... But always a toad, on the sidewalk at the greenhouse door, catching bugs in the butter-melt of light at night.

Today there was a big toad in the garden I weeded. We both were sheltered under cosmos. The toad startled me in a clump of grass, half submerged in the black-pearled dirt that worms had roiled up. Later, I startled some skateboarders just off the school bus - me, short and blond and quietly rattling around inside sunflowers and polygonum. Hidden, like I like to be.

I would never have seen the toad if it were not for the warts on its back. They look like geodes.

I live in the city now. There are no toads in my garden, or snakes. I hate that. I've been waiting for one for six years, and I'm going to move to the country soon because, while they have not come, I still seem to be here.

But there is a toad who lives between two sidewalk blocks on Cherry Street. You have to go down the alley, then up, anytime after the streetlamp has switched on. Then, there's Toad! So you say "evening, Toad." And Toad says nothing at all.